The New World was at the center of a variety of interests. Only slowly, however, did it become a space of the imaginary, the utopian, and the experience of others and oneself. Christian Kiening describes for the first time coherently how the two Americas are discovered as objects of aesthetic, literary and scientific meaning, how complex processes of exchange and intersections arise and figures of transition - the feral European and the Europeanized savage - emerge. The diverse stories of alterity and mimesis, of utopian and literary islands are dealt with. Kiening's brilliant study offers a prehistory of exoticism and a longing for nature and reveals the cultural and historical conditions under which the foreign is represented as the foreign.