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Victorians in the Mountains - Sinking the Sublime (Paperback)
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Victorians in the Mountains - Sinking the Sublime (Paperback)
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In her compelling book, Ann C. Colley examines the shift away from
the cult of the sublime that characterized the early part of the
nineteenth century to the less reverential perspective from which
the Victorians regarded mountain landscapes. And what a
multifaceted perspective it was, as unprecedented numbers of the
Victorian middle and professional classes took themselves off on
mountaineering holidays so commonplace that the editors of Punch
sarcastically reported that the route to the summit of Mont Blanc
was to be carpeted. In Part One, Colley mines diaries and letters
to interrogate how everyday tourists and climbers both responded to
and undercut ideas about the sublime, showing how technological
advances like the telescope transformed mountains into theatrical
spaces where tourists thrilled to the sight of struggling climbers;
almost inevitably, these distant performances were eventually
reenacted at exhibitions and on the London stage. Colley's
examination of the Alpine Club archives, periodicals, and other
primary resources offers a more complicated and inclusive picture
of female mountaineering as she documents the strong presence of
women on successful expeditions in the latter half of the century.
In Part Two, Colley turns to John Ruskin, Gerard Manley Hopkins,
and Robert Louis Stevenson, whose writings about the Alps reflect
their feelings about their Romantic heritage and shed light on
their ideas about perception, metaphor, and literary style. Colley
concludes by offering insights into the ways in which expeditions
to the Himalayas affected people's sense of the sublime, arguing
that these individuals were motivated as much by the glory of
Empire as by aesthetic sensibility. Her ambitious book is an astute
exploration of nationalism, as well as theories of gender,
spectacle, and the technicalities of glacial movement that were
intruding on what before had seemed inviolable.
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