In the popular imagination, the pioneering explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) provides the link between Romantic-era Germany and Latin America. But the reception and critical reworking of German Romantic culture reach far beyond Humboldt's legacy, and still inform contemporary Latin American writing. Initial responses to the European Romantic tradition were deeply embedded in the cultural nationalism of newly-independent nation states. Nineteenth-century Germans, however, often encountered the region through travel writing and landscape painting, in the context of a market for exotic images in the age of European empires. Today, Latin American authors problematize this historic relation, but their work also recalls German Romanticism's formal innovations: non-closure, fragmentation, genre subversion, and translation as linguistic reinvention. These become modes of resistance to a world literary market that replicates on an aesthetic level the colonial relationship between the viewer and the viewed.
In its wide-ranging exploration of these cultural affinities, this volume introduces and analyses a sub-field of world literature that transcends linguistic, temporal and spatial borders.
Jenny Haase is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literatures and Cultures at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Joanna Neilly is Associate Professor in German at the University of Oxford, and a Tutorial Fellow of St Peter's College.