Book ID: CBB001452025

The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment (2013)

unapi

Hansen, Peter H. (Author)


Harvard University Press


Publication Date: 2013
Physical Details: x + 380 pp.; ill.; maps
Language: English

The history of mountaineering has long served as a metaphor for civilization triumphant. Once upon a time, the Alps were an inaccessible habitat of specters and dragons, until heroic men -- pioneers of enlightenment -- scaled their summits, classified their strata and flora, and banished the phantoms forever. A fascinating interdisciplinary study of the first ascents of the major Alpine peaks and Mount Everest, The Summits of Modern Man surveys the far-ranging significance of our encounters with the world's most alluring and forbidding heights. Our obsession with "who got to the top first" may have begun in 1786, the year Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard climbed Mont Blanc and inaugurated an era in which Romantic notions of the sublime spurred climbers' aspirations. In the following decades, climbing lost its revolutionary cachet as it became associated instead with bourgeois outdoor leisure. Still, the mythic stories of mountaineers, threaded through with themes of imperialism, masculinity, and ascendant Western science and culture, seized the imagination of artists and historians well into the twentieth century, providing grist for stage shows, poetry, films, and landscape paintings. -- Jacket

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Reviewed By

Review Paul Gilchrist (2014) Review of "The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment". Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History. unapi

Review Diana L. Di Stefano (2015) Review of "The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment". Canadian Journal of History (pp. 213-215). unapi

Review Reidy, Michael Sean (2015) Review of "The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 726-727). unapi

Review Armiero, Marco (2014) Review of "The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment". American Historical Review (pp. 1347-1348). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001452025/

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Authors & Contributors
Alexandrowicz, Stefan Witold
Federico Prina
Byrne, Angela
Wigen, Kären
Vandersmissen, Jan
Speitz, Michele
Concepts
Travel; exploration
Geography
Science and art
Botany
Science and culture
Romanticism
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
18th century
Meiji period (Japan, 1868-1910)
17th century
16th century
Places
Arctic regions
Italy
Europe
Great Britain
Himalayan Mountains (Nepal)
Amazon River Region (South America)
Institutions
Royal Dublin Society
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