Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Adriana Craciun (bio) This special issue of studies in romanticism is devoted to places and senses in Romantic poetry. Traditionally in literary studies, place has been seen as complementary to space; the former is thought to be rooted, bounded, and associated with local authenticity, while the latter is abstract, empty, and associated with the universal and the global. Human geographers no longer think in terms of this place/space binary, however, but instead increasingly conceive of place as a dynamic meeting place, necessarily entangled with more distant, even global, developments. As Doreen Massey has argued, place is better thought of as an event than as a bounded location, “an ever-shifting constellation of trajectories” and mobilities.1 One of the Romantic era’s most intellectually and physically mobile men of letters, the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, spent five years exploring South and North America, and in his popular Aspects of Nature of 1808 (as the volume was first known in English), he devoted an essay to “The Nocturnal Life of Animals in the Primeval Forest.” His readers’ tropical visions were of landscapes to be looked at, but Humboldt wanted to evoke not the apparent uniformity of a tropical forest choked with vegetation, but rather, the species diversity converging in a tangle of unique places: the exceeding variety of their flora renders it vain to ask of what trees the primeval forest consists. A countless number of families are here crowded together and even in small spaces individuals of the same species are rarely associated. Each day, and at each change of place, new forms present themselves to the traveller, who, however, often finds that he cannot reach the blossoms of trees whose leaves and ramifications previously arrested his attention.2 Humboldt reveals a world dominated by the agency of plants, their movements, associations, innovations, and the arresting powers of their flowers. [End Page 347] Like Erasmus Darwin had done in The Botanic Garden, we might say that Humboldt restored to plants “their original animality.”3 Human travelers encounter new and distinct places everywhere they turn in this forest, places shaped by the convergence of nonhuman inhabitants. Humboldt draws our attention to the movements of animals along mysterious treetop routes and pathways “at considerable distances from each other, which have doubtless been made by the larger four-footed beasts of the forest” as they “stalk leisurely” through this seemingly impenetrable flora: There came down together, to drink, to bathe, or to fish, groups consisting of the most different classes of animals, the larger mammalia being associated with many-colored herons, palamedeas, and proudly-stepping curassow and cashew birds (Crax Alector and C. Pauxi). “Es como en el Paraiso”—it is here as in Paradise—said, with a pious air, our steersman, an old Indian, who had been brought up in the house of an ecclesiastic. The peace of the golden age was, however, far from prevailing among the animals of this American paradise, which carefully watched and avoided each other.4 Indigenous and Christian visions may converge in the steersman’s glimpse of Paradise, but instead of an unchanging Eden, Humboldt sees the forest as a cultivated and contested place, shaped largely by the secretive comings and goings of nonhuman animals and plants. Here it is helpful to draw on anthropologist Tim Ingold’s emphasis on place-making as a practice, instead of place as a static and bounded location. Far from being the unmarked, unoccupied, and undifferentiated space that we at first imagine, Humboldt’s primordial forest is what Ingold describes as a “tangled mesh of interwoven and complexly knotted strands”: “Every strand is a way of life, and every knot a place.”5 The wayfarers moving through and making this complex mesh are for the most part nonhuman animals. They break trails, broker uneasy truces, negotiate co-travel, walk with leisure and pleasure, and fight fierce battles invisible to humans, which we register only through the nocturnal “wild cries of animals [that] appeared to rage throughout the forest.”6 We see and hear in Humboldt’s primordial forest not Nature herself in all her Romantic grandeur as sublime landscape, but partial traces of place-making, where the...