»L’OCÉAN, QUI S’ÉLÈVE ENTRE NOS HÉMISPHÈRES«

How was America perceived and described during the European Enlightenment? And how did this image change in the course of the Spanish American independence move-ments? This volume explores the interplay between literature and knowledge in the transatlantic world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The contributions exam-ine a range of genres, from opera and tragedy to novels and travel writing, as well as po-litical and natural-historical works. They show how literary texts perpetuate colonial sys-tems of knowledge, but also transform and challenge them. In doing so, the volume highlights literature as an independent site for the production, mediation, and transfor-mation of knowledge.