Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity

ISBN-13: 9781350194106 / Angielski / Miękka / 2022 / 272 str.

UK) Dawn Hollis (University of St Andrews; UK) Professor Jason König (University of St Andrews

Opis

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.

Spis treści

Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Note on translations and Order of Chapters Introduction – Dawn Hollis (University of St Andrews, UK) and Jason König (University of St Andrews, UK) 1. Gessner’s mountain sublime – Dan Hooley (University of Missouri, USA) 2. ‘Famous from all antiquity’: Etna in classical myth and Romantic poetry – Cian Duffy (Lund University, Sweden) 3. The ‘authority of the ancients’? Seventeenth-century natural philosophy and aesthetic responses to mountains – Dawn Hollis (University of St Andrews, UK) 4. Toward a continuity of Alpinism in antiquity, premodernity, and modernity: Josias Simler’s De Alpibus Commentarius (1574) and W. A. B. Coolidge’s French translation from 1904 – Sean Ireton (University of Missouri, USA) 5. Mountains and the holy in late antiquity – Douglas Whalin (The Catholic University of America, USA) 6. Erudite retreat: Jerome and Francis in the mountains – Janice Hewlett Koelb (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA) 7. Sublime visions of Virginia: Thomas Jefferson’s Romantic mountainscapes – Alley Marie Jordan (University of Edinburgh, UK) 8. Edward Dodwell in the Peloponnese: Mountains and the classical past in nineteenth-century Mediterranean travel writing – Jason König (University of St Andrews, UK) 9. The top story: truth and sublimity in Patrick Brydone’s account of his 1770 ascent of Mt Etna – Gareth D. Williams (University of Columbia, USA) 10. Mountains of memory: a phenomenological approach to mountains in fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy – Chloe Bray (University of St Andrews, UK) 11. Mountains, identity, and the legend of King Brennus in the early modern English imaginary – Harriet Archer (University of St Andrews, UK) 12. Upland on Mont Ventoux – Peter Hansen (Worcester Polytechnic Institute, UK) Notes Bibliography Index