Textual Differences in A.v. Humboldt’s Essai politique sur l’île de Cuba. An editorial commentary […]
Author: Tobias Kraft
published in HiN XIII, 24 (2012)
Tobias Kraft’s study is based on an editorial report, which was presented at the 2009 working conference „Alexander von Humboldt and the Hemisphere“ at Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN). It demonstrates the textual genesis of Humboldt’s writings on Cuba through examples, which were obtained from a detailed text comparison of the three existing „original“ versions of Humboldt’s Essai politique sur l’île de Cuba. The collation was part of a larger strategy to regain philological ground for the „Humboldt in English“ (HiE) project. Since 2007 and funded with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation, and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the US-German research team behind HiE has been working on new and unabridged translations and critical editions of three of Humboldt’s most significant texts from his American oeuvre. The following observations will outline the most important results of this collation effort as a complementary contribution to the recent release of the HiE project’s first volume, The Political Essay on the Island of Cuba (Chicago University Press 2011), edited by Vera M. Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette.
Contents:
- Text Corpus and Publication History
- Publication dates and text distribution
- Textual genesis and text comparison
- Conclusions to be drawn from the table and its findings
- HiE – a work in progress project
- Works Cited
