ABSTRACT
Alexander von Humboldt’s resistance to dogmatism finds its literary equivalent in his non-totalizing narrative structures and his richly textured voice, both of which have tended to disappear in translation. Since the nineteenth century, Humboldtian avatars have been constructed to shore up all sorts of discourses and, at times, have been deployed even for opposing political causes. In the twentieth century, when the fortunes of Humboldtian science had waned in the USA and elsewhere as a result of increasing academic specialization, Humboldt’s work was used both as an apology for Nazism and in defense of Marxism. There has been no dearth of scholarly monographs either in the decade leading up to the 150th anniversary of Humboldt’s death, which provided the occasion for several conferences in Germany, the USA and England—as well as for this collection.
