Mountains So Sublime
Mountains So Sublime

Author: Terry P. Abraham

Publisher: Michigan State University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13:

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"Picturesque," "immense," "fantastic," and "sublime" are but a few of the words that early British travelers used to describe the nineteenth-century Rocky Mountain landscape and surrounding terrain. As part of a long tradition of travelers' tales, these British tourists, explorers, adventurers, writers, scientists, artists, missionaries, and merchants all looked for ways to describe and illustrate places they visited--in this instance, the vast and strange wilderness landscape of the North America's Rocky Mountains. Using both published and unpublished resources, Terry Abraham weaves these observations, their aesthetic, and their "Britishness" into a refreshing and unique view of an all-but-vanished "West." In their efforts to make the Rocky Mountain West real to a readership on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, these visitors from two centuries past encouraged a growing realization that this part of the North American landscape was unique, a special part of the world's natural heritage. Many also tried to describe the changes that were being visited on the Rockies by onrushing progress. They were among the first who cautioned against excessive human encroachment on the landscape; in fact, they demonstrated what might be called "environmental pre-awareness." Twenty-first century readers will discover surprising parallels between modern environmental and conservation issues and the concerns expressed by these early travelers from the nineteenth.

Victorians in the Mountains
Victorians in the Mountains

Author: Professor Ann C Colley

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2013-04-28

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 140947626X

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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.

Becoming a Mountain
Becoming a Mountain

Author: Stephen Alter

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2015-03-10

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1628725427

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Hailed as a "wondrous book" by Gretel Ehrlich, and winner of the Kekoo Naoroji Book Award for Himalayan Literature—a journey of healing that becomes a pilgrimage for the soul. Stephen Alter was raised by American missionary parents in the hill station of Mussoorie, in the foothills of the Himalayas, where he and his wife, Ameeta, now live. Their idyllic existence was brutally interrupted when four armed intruders invaded their house and viciously attacked them, leaving them for dead. The violent assault and the trauma of almost dying left him questioning assumptions he had lived by since childhood. For the first time, he encountered the face of evil and the terror of the unknown. He felt like a foreigner in the land of his birth. This book is his account of a series of treks he took in the high Himalayas following his convalescence—to Bandar Punch (the monkey’s tail), Nanda Devi, the second highest mountain in India, and Mt. Kailash in Tibet. He set himself this goal to prove that he had healed mentally as well as physically and to re-knit his connection to his homeland. Undertaken out of sorrow, the treks become a moving soul journey, a way to rediscover mountains in his inner landscape. Weaving together observations of the natural world, Himalayan history, folklore and mythology, as well as encounters with other pilgrims along the way, Stephen Alter has given us a moving meditation on the solace of high places, and on the hidden meanings and enduring mystery of mountains.