The appropriation of world knowledge. Adelbert von Chamisso's world tour (transcription, analysis, interpretation)

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Adelbert von Chamisso (1781-1838) numbers among the most famous authors of the 19th century, yet the bulk of his work remains neglected to the present day. Some of his poems and Peter Schlemihl" belong to the canon of German literature, but his scientific works and the different versions of his Voyage around the world have rarely been studied. The intended research project aims to explore the connections between literature and natural science in the first half of the 19th century. This study gives equal credit to Chamisso the poet and Chamisso the scientist for the first time. The starting point of the project is the hypothesis that his voyage around the world (1815-1818) occupies a central position in the larger body of his work. Combined with his (widely unpublished) letters and his scientific papers, the voyage is essential to the unique literary and scientific persona that the author adopted after his self-proclaimed farewell to romantic poetry around 1813. The basis of this project consists in the transcription, publication and analysis of the (hitherto unstudied) original diaries of the travels (found in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin). The research group combines history of science, zoology, botany and literary criticism to study the genesis, appropriation and representation of botanical, zoological and ethnografic knowledge in the work of Chamisso. In comparison with other world-travel literature and 19th-century natural history, the project elucidates the genuine contribution of his travel accounts, scientific work and late poetry made to the modern emergence of different cultures of knowledge as well as separate, i.e. literary, poetic and scientific, ways of seeing the world.