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XVI EXOTIC LITERATURE AND THE COLONIAL NOVEL The fog of pessimism during and after the First War is no doubt one of the explanations of the vogue of literature which describes far-away climes: it represents a flight from reality. Exotic literature, of course, goes back to the end of the eighteenth century1 (Georg Forster's A Voyage towards the South Pole and round the World, 1777, and J. G. Seume's verse tale Der Wilde2) and continues with Chamisso's R.eise urn die Welt in den Jahren xSij-iS and Alexander von Humboldt's Kosmos (1845-58). Exotic fiction shapes itself on such writers as Fennimore Cooper in the American and Wild West novels ^Wildmst-'R.omantiK} of Charles Sealsfield (1793-1864) and Friedrich Gerstacker (1816-72). There is still an English undertone in the exotic writings of Paul Lindau's brother RUDOLF LINDAU (1829-1910: Er^ahlungen eines Effendi, 1896): he was a far-travelled diplomat, as much inter- national as German (his first work, on Japan, was in French, and as Swiss consul at Yokohama he founded the Japan Times, the best English newspaper in Japan). The new exotic style blooms with tropic splendour in the impressionistic prose (Gedankengut aus meinen Wanderjahren, 2 vols., 1913; Erlebnisse auf Java, 1924) of Max Dauthendey (pp. 245 £), and he has a good second in the Luxemburger NORBERT JACQUES (1880-). We get the Far East in 1 Gabriel Rollenhagen's Vierditcher mnderbarMer indianiscfar RJSJSW (160$) repeat ancient fables, and the exotic novels of the seventeenth century are also fabulous, 2 Seume's knowledge of America was first-hand: he was kidnapped in Hesse, and sold to England to fight the American rebels. His prose travel descriptions are good forerunners of those by die Europamud&n of today. The craze for America was held up to ridicule by Ferdinand Kiirnberger in his novel Der Amerika-Mude (1855); he had never been in America, but used Lenau's American experiences (1832). 377