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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.
What did the 13th Earl of Derby, his twenty-two-year-old niece,
Manchester's Belle Vue Zoo, and even some ordinary laborers all
have in common? All were avid collectors and exhibitors of exotic,
and frequently unruly, specimens. In her study of Britain's craze
for natural history collecting, Ann C. Colley makes extensive use
of archival materials to examine the challenges, preoccupations,
and disordered circumstances that attended the amassing of
specimens from faraway places only vaguely known to the British
public. As scientific institutions sent collectors to bring back
exotic animals and birds for study and classification by anatomists
and zoologist, it soon became apparent that collecting skins rather
than live animals or birds was a relatively more manageable
endeavor. Colley looks at the collecting, exhibiting, and
portraying of animal skins to show their importance as trophies of
empire and representations of identity. While a zoo might display
skins to promote and glorify Britain's colonial achievements,
Colley suggests that the reality of collecting was characterized
more by chaos than imperial order. For example, Edward Lear's
commissioned illustrations of the Earl of Derby's extensive
collection challenge the colonial's or collector's commanding gaze,
while the Victorian public demonstrated a yearning to connect with
their own wildness by touching the skins of animals. Colley
concludes with a discussion of the metaphorical uses of wild skins
by Gerard Manley Hopkins and other writers, exploring the idea of
skin as a locus of memory and touch where one's past can be traced
in the same way that nineteenth-century mapmakers charted a
landscape. Throughout the book Colley calls upon recent theories
about the nature and function of skin and touch to structure her
discussion of the Victorian fascination with wild animal skins.
In her distinguished and hauntingly rendered book, Ann C. Colley
provides a fresh insight into Stevenson's multi-voiced South Seas
fiction, as well as into the particulars and complications of
living within a newly established site of Empire. Bringing to light
information from the archives of the London Missionary Society and
from other sources, such as the Royal Geographical Society
(London), the Writers' Museum (Edinburgh), the Beinecke Library
(Yale University), and the Huntington Library (San Marino,
California), Colley examines the intricate nature of Robert Louis
Stevenson's relation to imperialism. In particular, she
investigates Stevenson's complex relationship to the missionary
culture that surrounded him during the last six years of his life
(1888-1894), revealing hitherto unscouted routes by which to
understand Stevenson's experiences while he was cruising among the
South Sea islands, and later while he was a resident colonial in
Samoa. Beginning with a history of the missionaries in the Pacific
that reveals Stevenson's criticism of, yet ultimate support for,
their work, and demonstrates how these attitudes helped shape his
South Sea fiction, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial
Imagination constitutes a major work of reconstruction from
archival sources. Subsequent chapters focus on Stevenson's
struggles with personal and cultural identity in the South Seas,
and his interest in photography, panoramas, and magic lantern
shows, revealing Stevenson's sensitivity to the ways light plays
upon darkness to create meaning. In addition, Stevenson's serious
commitment to political issues and his thoughts about power and
nationhood are explored. Finally, Stevenson's recollections of his
childhood are engaged not only to suggest an unacknowledged source
(the juvenile missionary magazines) for A Child's Garden of Verses,
but also to illuminate the generous reach of his imagination that
exceeds the formulae of the missionary culture and the boundaries
of the colonial construct.
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.
When Coleridge described the landscapes he passed through while
scrambling among the fells, mountains, and valleys of Britain, he
did something unprecedented in Romantic writing: to capture what
emerged before his eyes, he enlisted a geometric idiom. Immersed in
a culture still beholden to Euclid's Elements and schooled by those
who subscribed to its principles, he valued geometry both for its
pragmatic function and for its role as a conduit to abstract
thought. Indeed, his geometric training would often structure his
observations on religion, aesthetics, politics, and philosophy. For
Coleridge, however, this perspective never competed with his
sensitivity to the organic nature of his surroundings but, rather,
intermingled with it. Situating Coleridge's remarkable ways of
seeing within the history and teaching of mathematics and alongside
the eighteenth century's budding interest in non-Euclidean
geometry, Ann Colley illuminates the richness of the culture of
walking and the surprising potential of landscape writing.
Critical response to Lear's literary, journalistic, musical and
artistic output. This book is a history of how critics from the
nineteenth century on have regarded Lear's extensive work. The
survey includes not only what has been written in Great Britain and
North America; it is also includes that which has come out of
Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Greece, India and the Ukraine. In
addition to offering a chronological sense of the various responses
to Lear's work, the book identifies patterns of thought that run
through the numerous critical reactions.
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