Cities, Mountains and Being Modern in fin-de-siècle England and Germany

Cities, Mountains and Being Modern in fin-de-siècle England and Germany
Author: Ben Anderson
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2020-01-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137540001

This book is the first transnational history of rambling and mountaineering. Focussing on the critical turn-of-the-century era, it offers new insights into alpine development, attitudes to danger, cultures of time, internationalism and domesticity in the outdoors. It charts an emerging group of mass tourist activities, and argues that these thousands of walkers and climbers can only be understood within the context of the urban cultures from which most of them came. In doing so, it offers a fresh perspective on the relationship of alpinists and countryside enthusiasts to the modern world. Instead of an escape from or rejection of modernity, it finds that upland trampers and climbers contested what it meant to be modern, used those modern identities to make political claims on rural space and rural people, and sought to define what a more modern future society should be like.

The Draw of the Alps

The Draw of the Alps
Author: Richard McClelland
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2023-10-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3111150534

The Alps have exerted a hold over the German cultural imagination throughout the modern period, enthralling writers, artists, philosophers, scientists, and tourists alike. The Draw of the Alps interrogates the dynamics of this fascination. Though philosophical and aesthetic responses to Alpine space have shifted over time, the Alps continue to captivate at an individual and collective level. This has resulted in myriad cultural engagements with Alpine space, as this interdisciplinary volume attests. Literature, photography, and philosophy continue to engage with the Alps as a place in which humans pursue their cognitive and aesthetic limits. At the same time, individuals engage physically with the alpine environment, whether as visitors through the well-established leisure industry, as enthusiasts of extreme sports, or as residents who feel the acute end of social and environmental change. Taking a transnational view of Alpine space, the volume demonstrates that the Alps are not geographically peripheral to the nation-state but are a vibrant locus of modern cultural production. As The Draw of the Alps attests, the Alps are nothing less than a crucible in which understandings of what it means to be human have been forged.

Rethinking Geographical Explorations in Extreme Environments

Rethinking Geographical Explorations in Extreme Environments
Author: Marco Armiero
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2022-07-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000624145

Focusing on extreme environments, from Umberto Nobile’s expedition to the Arctic to the commercialization of Mt Everest, this volume examines global environmental margins, how they are conceived and how perceptions have changed. Mountaintops and Arctic environments are the settings of social encounters, political strategies, individual enterprises, geopolitical tensions, decolonial practises, and scientific experiments. Concentrating on mountaineering and Arctic exploration between 1880 – 1960, contributors to this volume show how environmental marginalisation has been discursively implemented and materially generated by foreign and local actors. It examines to what extent the status and identity of extreme environments has changed during modern times, moving them from periphery to the centre and discarding their marginality. The first section looks at ways in which societies have framed remoteness, through the lens of commercialization, colonialism, knowledge production and sport, while the second examines the reverse transfer, focusing on how extreme nature has influenced societies, through international network creation, political consensus and identity building. This collection enriches the historical understanding of exploration by adopting a critical approach and offering multidimensional and multi-gaze reconstructions. This book is essential reading for students and scholars interested in environmental history, geography, colonial studies and the environmental humanities.

Greening Europe

Greening Europe
Author: Anna-Katharina Wöbse
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2021-12-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110665786

Today, the environment seems omnipresent in European policy within and beyond the European Union. The idea of a shared European environment, however, has come a long way and is still being contested. Greening Europe focuses on the many ways people have interacted with nature and made it an issue of European concern. The authors ask how notions of Europe mattered in these activities and they expose the many entanglements of activists across the subcontinent who set out to connect and network, and to exchange knowledge, worldviews, and strategies that exceeded their national horizons. Moving beyond human agency, the handbook also highlights the eminent role nature played in both "greening" Europe and making Europe a shared environment.

Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity

Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity
Author: Dawn Hollis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2021-05-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350162841

Throughout the longue dureé of Western culture, how have people represented mountains as landscapes of the imagination and as places of real experience? In what ways has human understanding of mountains changed – or stayed the same? Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity opens up a new conversation between ancient and modern engagements with mountains. It highlights the ongoing relevance of ancient understandings of mountain environments to the postclassical and present-day world, while also suggesting ways in which modern approaches to landscape can generate new questions about premodern responses. It brings together experts from across many different disciplines and periods, offering case studies on topics ranging from classical Greek drama to Renaissance art, and from early modern natural philosophy to nineteenth-century travel writing. Throughout, essays engage with key themes of temporality, knowledge, identity, and experience in the mountain landscape. As a whole, the volume suggests that modern responses to mountains participate in rhetorical and experiential patterns that stretch right back to the ancient Mediterranean. It also makes the case for collaborative, cross-period research as a route both for understanding human relations with the natural world in the past, and informing them in the present.

The Folds of Olympus

The Folds of Olympus
Author: Jason König
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2022-08-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691238499

A cultural and literary history of mountains in classical antiquity The mountainous character of the Mediterranean was a crucial factor in the history of the ancient Greek and Roman world. The Folds of Olympus is a cultural and literary history that explores the important role mountains played in Greek and Roman religious, military, and economic life, as well as in the identity of communities over a millennium—from Homer to the early Christian saints. Aimed at readers of ancient history and literature as well as those interested in mountains and the environment, the book offers a powerful account of the landscape at the heart of much Greek and Roman culture. Jason König charts the importance of mountains in religion and pilgrimage, the aesthetic vision of mountains in art and literature, the place of mountains in conquest and warfare, and representations of mountain life. He shows how mountains were central to the way in which the inhabitants of the ancient Mediterranean understood the boundaries between the divine and the human, and the limits of human knowledge and control. He also argues that there is more continuity than normally assumed between ancient descriptions of mountains and modern accounts of the picturesque and the sublime. Offering a unique perspective on the history of classical culture, The Folds of Olympus is also a resoundingly original contribution to the literature on mountains.

The Development of the Hotel and Tourism Industry in the Twentieth Century

The Development of the Hotel and Tourism Industry in the Twentieth Century
Author: Carlos Larrinaga
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2023-12-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3031458893

This edited collection explores the pivotal role of the hotel industry in building Western Europe’s tourism economy during the 20th century. The book brings together ten contributions focused on the same period, 1900-1970, to offer comparative perspectives from across the region including Italy, Switzerland, France, Spain and Britain. Drawing on historical case studies, chapters illuminate the different factors linking hotels and the broader tourism system including interventions of the public authorities and the State, the importance of private involvement, commercial strategies, the medium-term development of private hotels, hotel entrepreneurship, and the impact of economic crises and wars. By placing differing national approaches taken to the growth of the hotel industry in comparison, the book aims to fill a gap in the historiography of European hospitality and shed light on the wider impact of hotels and tourism on economic development at both a national and regional level. It will be of interest to a range of scholars, including in economic and business history, tourism studies, the history of tourism management, and social history.

All and Nothing

All and Nothing
Author: Jeff Smoot
Publisher: Mountaineers Books
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2022-08-25
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1680513338

"...an excellent resource for anyone interested in the history and psychology of free soloing." -- Steve Potter ― Climbing Magazine An insider’s perspective on free soloing From the author of the critically acclaimed Hangdog Days Examines what motivates people to climb without a rope Once considered a fringe activity, climbing without a rope has entered the mainstream consciousness, largely because of the Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo featuring professional climber Alex Honnold. Yet climbers have been free soloing all along—motivated by reasons as varied as the climbers themselves. All and Nothing delves into the cultural history of free soloing, ranging across the storied climbing cultures of the Alps, Rocky Mountains, Sierra Nevada, Joshua Tree, Yosemite, the Gunks, Eldorado Canyon, and several other locales. Writer and climber Jeff Smoot explores the interplay of climbing and risk, as well as psychological theories, evolving ethics, the effect of media coverage (particularly the portrayal of extreme sports), and shares original interviews with dozens of free soloists. Smoot also recounts his personal experiences climbing without a rope in the same era as talented climbers like Mark Twight and Peter Croft. From inside his complex connection to free soloing, he examines our relationship with risk, how we perceive our sense of control, and our perspective on mortality.

Travel and Classical Antiquities in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Greece

Travel and Classical Antiquities in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Greece
Author: Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2024-12-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040264840

Western travel and collecting classical antiquities in the nineteenth century informed European understandings of Greece's past and present, and enriched private collections and museums. Travel and collecting have typically been studied separately by literary scholars, historians of archaeology, and historians of the Ottoman Empire and modern Greece. Similarly, publications have largely prioritised evidence from and about elite social groups. This book breaks new ground through its interdisciplinary approach, its insistence on the interweaving of the phenomena of travel and collecting, and its emphasis on marginalised perspectives. Contributors drawn from art history, classics, history of architecture, Ottoman history and modern Greek history foreground diversity and small-scale engagements with the landscape and material past of Ottoman Greece. The book explores the perspectives of both foreign travellers and local inhabitants through case studies, keeping a sharp focus on ethnicity and social status. Diaries, visual art, and rich archival material are analysed, often from a novel perspective, to give voice to a range of people including English servants, Albanian peasants, an illiterate Greek fighter, and the Ottoman Sultan. The result is a micro-cultural history of travel and classical collecting which expands existing narratives. As such, it changes the simplistic dichotomy between collecting as ‘pillaging’ or ‘saving’, and nuances the important current debate surrounding repatriation. Travel and Classical Antiquities in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Greece addresses scholars in the areas of classical reception studies, classical archaeology, material culture studies, nineteenth-century studies, Ottoman studies and modern Greek studies. It will also appeal to a broader audience of people interested in travel writing, the history of archaeology and the history of Greece.

Handbook of Modern British Painting and Printmaking 1900-90

Handbook of Modern British Painting and Printmaking 1900-90
Author: Alan Windsor
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 628
Release: 2022-02-23
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0429614861

Originally published in 1998, The Handbook of Modern British Painting and Printmaking 1900-1990 has been designed for people who enjoy, study and buy British art. The only portable dictionary-style guide to the life and work of modern British painters and printmakers, the book provides information on some 2,000 artists, as well as entries on schools of art, on museums, galleries and collections, on societies and groups, and critics and patrons who have influenced the development of modern art in Britain. Compiled by scholars, the entries are cross-referenced and each concise biographical outline provides the relevant facts about the artist's life, a brief characterisation of the artist's work, and major bibliographic references. Wherever possible, one or two suggestions for further reading are cited.