Personal narrative / Alexander von Humboldt ; abridged and translated with an introduction by Jason Wilson ; and a historical introduction by Malcolm Nicolson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Humboldt, Alexander von, 1769-1859.

Contributor:

Wilson, Jason, 1944-

Series:

Penguin classics

Standardized Title:

Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du nouveau continent. Selections. English

Language:

English

French

Subjects (All):

South America--Description and travel.

South America.

Venezuela--Description and travel.

Venezuela.

Natural history--South America.

Natural history.

Scientific expeditions.

Humboldt, Alexander von, 1769-1859.

Humboldt, Alexander von.

Physical Description:

lxxii, 310 pages : map ; 20 cm.

Other Title:

Personal narrative of a journey to the equinoctial regions of the new continent

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Penguin Books, 1995.

Summary:

Alexander von Humboldt became a wholly new kind of nineteenth-century hero - the scientist-explorer - and in Personal Narrative he invented a new literary genre, the travelogue. Between 1799 and 1804 he explored the tropical Spanish Americas, by his death in 1859 he had won international fame. He was the first European to discuss, draw and speculate on Aztec art, the first to observe reverse polarity in magnetism, the first to propagate the notion of seismic waves, the first to discover why America is called America. A true Romantic, an admirer of Rousseau and close friend of Goethe, Humboldt was a passionate observer, never a colonial despoiler, and his writings made a profound impact upon the course of Victorian science. This volume contains a fascinating selection from Humboldt's original 1,997 pages of Personal Narrative, in the first English translation to appear since 1851.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (page lxx-lxxii).

ISBN:

0140445536

OCLC:

34917474