The paper tries to investigate the process in which Europe perceived its own landscape in the context of Romanticism, and analyze how the Romantic perception of landscape was translated into the invention of the tropicality. First, it will explore European tradition of tree worship and the Garden of Eden in relation to John Milton. Second, I will explore Goethe’s biogeographical perception of Italian landscape in the context of German Romanticism. Third, the article will identify the aesthetic meaning of the 18th century landscape paintings according to Edmund Burke’s and Kant’s concept of the sublime. Last but not the least, I will illuminate how Joseph Conrad, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Thomas Mann invented the tropicality in the wake of Romantic biogeography.
The Garden of Eden had been a central space of Europe’s Christian identity. According to European tradition, trees and forests had served as signs, metaphors, and symbols for the ‘botanical cosmos’ in myths and popular narratives. While John Milton compared it to the ‘theatre of forests,’ Nicholas Poussin and Claude Lorrain represented it as an object or subject of landscape paintings. It was through the Italian journey that Goethe coined the concept of archetypal plant, Urpflanze, which was later upgraded into the archetype of art, Urformen der Kunst, by Karl Blossfeldt. Goethe’s Paracelsusian genius as a pioneer of German Romanticism consisted in his enormous capacity to combine Johann Gottfried Herder’s climatic historicism, Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s organic aesthetics of Hellenism, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s morphological view of nature.
It was the sublime in nature that the Eighteenth-century European landscape painters such as Joseph M. W. Turner, John Constable, William Hodges, and Caspar David Friedrich represented in their paintings. Romantic perspective of landscape provided European artists and novelists with a sort of epistemological viewpoint from which to transform geographical tropical regions into the imaginative space of tropicality.
European artists and novelists could search for the highest Romanticism in tropical regions. Joseph Conrad, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Thomas Mann shared Alexander Humboldt’s Romantic biogeography to shape the invention of the tropicality by making tropical regions ‘the otherness.’