Thisbook explores Wordsworth's extraordinaryinfluence on the tourist landscape of the Lake District throughout the age ofrailways, motorcars and the First World War. It explores how patterns of tourist behaviour andenvironmental awareness changed in the century of popular tourism, examininghow Wordsworth's vision shaped modern ideas of travel, landscape and culturalheritage.
In her study of the opening of the English Lake District to mass tourism, Saeko Yoshikawa examines William Wordsworth’s role in the rise and development of the region as a popular destination. For the middle classes on holiday, guidebooks not only offered practical information, but they also provided a fresh motive and a new model of appreciation by associating writers with places. The nineteenth century saw the invention of Robert Burns’s and Walter Scott’s Borders, Shakespeare’s Stratford, and the Brontë Country as holiday locales for the middle classes. Investigating the international cult of Wordsworthian tourism, Yoshikawa shows both how Wordsworth’s public celebrity was constructed through the tourist industry and how the cultural identity of the Lake District was influenced by the poet’s presence and works. Informed by extensive archival work, her book provides an original case study of the contributions of Romantic writers to the invention of middle-class tourism and the part guidebooks played in promoting the popular reputations of authors.
This book explores Wordsworth’s extraordinary influence on the tourist landscapes of the Lake District throughout the age of railways, motorcars and the First World War. It reveals how Wordsworth’s response to railways was not a straightforward matter of opposition and protest; his ideas were taken up by both advocates and opponents of railways, and through their controversies had a surprising impact on the earliest motorists as they sought a language to describe the liberty and independence of their new mode of transport. Once the age of motoring was underway, the outbreak of the First World War encouraged British people to connect Wordsworth’s patriotic passion with his wish to protect the Lake District as a national heritage – a transition that would have momentous effects in the interwar period, when popular motoring paradoxically brought a vogue for open-air activities and a renewal of romantic pedestrianism. With the arrival of global tourism, preservation of the cultural landscape of the Lake District became an urgent national and international concern. This book explores how patterns of tourist behaviour and environmental awareness changed in the century of popular tourism, examining how Wordsworth’s vision and language shaped modern ideas of travel, self-reliance, landscape and environment, cultural heritage, preservation and accessibility.
In William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship, Scott Hess explores Wordsworth’s defining role in establishing what he designates as "the ecology of authorship": a primarily middle-class, nineteenth-century conception of nature associated with aesthetics, high culture, individualism, and nation. Instead of viewing Wordsworth as an early ecologist, Hess places him within a context that is largely cultural and aesthetic. The supposedly universal Wordsworthian vision of nature, Hess argues, was in this sense specifically male, middle-class, professional, and culturally elite—factors that continue to shape the environmental movement today.
One of the century's most influential philosophers assesses a movement that changed the course of history in this unedited transcript of his 1965 Mellon lecture series. "Exhilaratingly thought-provoking".--"Times London".
At the heart of “tourismophobia”, past and present, is the question of the masses and the differentiation between those who call themselves “travellers”, denying their own tourism, and tourists. Tourismophobia studies the persistence of the repulsion for them, and though their number is infinitely greater today, they are no longer socially the same and practices have radically changed. This book brings this cultural invariant out of the shadows to understand the driving forces behind this social posture, which has taken a new turn with climate change. Without overlooking the negative effects of tourism, this book is a response to the current debate on “overtourism”, which is the most contemporary form of tourismophobia.
In the Romantic period, women writers developed specific aesthetics and writing strategies in their engagements with climate change and climate catastrophe. Anya Heise-von der Lippe draws on intersectional feminist and ecocritical approaches to highlight gender as a complicating category in Romantic engagements with these topics. She addresses the ways in which gendered critical framings continue to resonate in current Anthropocene discourses that use Romantic conceptualizations of »Nature«, impacting contemporary approaches to the relationship between humans and non-humans in the ongoing climate catastrophe.
The life of our planet has reached a critical stage. Its survival depends on our ability to rethink our relationship with ecology, and create a new economy which does not rely on economic growth, and supports care and sustainability for our planet. This book examines histories of alternative economic theories to advocate for different ways of economic distribution that do not keep producing emissions. It calls into question our philosophy of time, our relationship with ecology, and the original creation of debt, interest, and ways of avoiding exponential economic growth. The author uses ideas from Maori philosophy, Mesopotamian finance and quantum mechanics to set out a new basis for economic theory which is no longer set up on greedy individualism, or a hierarchical trickle-down effect, or even overall economic growth. Instead, this new materialist philosophy emphasises the integration of humanity and the ecosystem, and sets out to create a philosophy of economics built on interconnection and care.
Why and how did people read literature on North America by explorers, travellers, emigrants, and tourists? This is the central question Robin Jarvis takes up as he addresses a significant gap in scholarship on travel writing: its contemporary reception. Referencing reviews in the periodical press, personal journals, letters, autobiographies, marginalia, and bibliographical evidence relating to the production, distribution, and reception of travel literature, Jarvis focuses especially on the ideas and perceptions of North America expressed by individuals who never visited the subcontinent. Among the issues Jarvis explores are what the British reception of North American travel narratives says about the ways in which the United States was imagined in the Romantic period; how poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Felicia Hemans, Robert Southey, and William Wordsworth, all voracious travel readers, incorporated their readings of travel books into their works; and the ways in which the reception of North American travel writing should be contextualized within the broader contours of British society and culture. Significantly, Jarvis differentiates between different communities of readers to show the extent to which class or professional status affected the way travel literature was read. Of equally crucial importance, he discusses the reception of travel literature on Canada and the Arctic as distinct from that on the United States. His book constitutes the most thorough exploration to date of the private reading experiences of travel literature during the Romantic period.
An increasingly popular genre – addressing issues of empire, colonialism, post-colonialism, globalization, gender and politics – travel writing offers the reader a movement between the familiar and the unknown. In this volume, Carl Thompson: introduces the genre, outlining competing definitions and key debates provides a broad historical survey from the medieval period to the present day explores the autobiographical dimensions of the form looks at both men and women’s travel writing, surveying a range of canonical and more marginal works, drawn from both the colonial and postcolonial era utilises both British and American travelogues to consider the genre's role in shaping the history of both nations. Concise and practical, Travel Writing is the ideal introduction for those new to the subject, as well as a crucial overview of current debates in the field.
