"Peak Pursuits"

New from Yale University Press: Peak Pursuits: The Emergence of Mountaineering in the Nineteenth Century by Caroline Schaumann.

About the book, from the publisher:

An interdisciplinary cultural history of exploration and mountaineering in the nineteenth century

European forays to mountain summits began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the search for plants and minerals and the study of geology and glaciers. Yet scientists were soon captivated by the enterprise of climbing itself, enthralled with the views and the prospect of “conquering” alpine summits. Inspired by Romantic notions of nature, early mountaineers idealized their endeavors as sublime experiences, all the while deliberately measuring what they saw. As increased leisure time and advances in infrastructure and equipment opened up once formidable mountain regions to those seeking adventure and sport, new models of masculinity emerged that were fraught with tensions. This book examines how written and artistic depictions of nineteenth-century exploration and mountaineering in the Andes, the Alps, and the Sierra Nevada shaped cultural understandings of nature and wilderness in the Anthropocene.

Caroline Schaumann is professor of German studies at Emory University. She is co-editor of Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century and author of Memory Matters: Generational Responses to Germany’s Nazi Past in Recent Women’s Literature.

--Marshal Zeringue