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Dawn L Hollis Email: dljw@st-andrews.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3549-1447 ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Volume 26, Issue 4, Autumn 2019, Pages 1038–1061, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isz044
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30 May 2019
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Dawn L Hollis, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Genealogy of an Idea, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Volume 26, Issue 4, Autumn 2019, Pages 1038–1061, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isz044
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In 1959, the literary scholar Marjorie Hope Nicolson set out to solve “a basic problem in the history of taste.” This problem was one of why, and how, attitudes toward mountains had changed “so spectacularly” in English literature and culture between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (vii). The monograph in which Nicolson sought to solve this problem—drawing together poetry, theology, and natural philosophy—has gone on to attain the rare status of a sixty-year-old academic text which is still regularly cited to this day. Its surtitle, as much as anything else—Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory—is now emblematic of a widely accepted concept within the history of landscape: that of a European-wide shift from premodern distaste and fear toward mountains, to the modern context of climbing, enthusiasm, and awe.
Nicolson’s monograph is cited across academic fields: in the history of landscape and environment, in the philosophical study of aesthetics, in literary studies and accounts of mountaineering.1 Only relatively recently have scholars sought to modify or challenge the thesis of “mountain gloom” (Koelb).2 Several studies that have engaged closely with Nicolson’s work have sought merely to “push back” the date of the shift from gloom to glory—for example, in proposing that positive mountain attitudes appeared earlier than she suggested—without challenging the sense of a dichotomous change (Korenjak; Barton). More recent, and in some cases nascent, work has sought to argue generally against any perception of premodern “mountain gloom,” pointing towards evidence for more positive and nuanced engagement with mountains from the classical, medieval, and early modern eras (König; Hollis).3 However, there is no doubt that the basic concept has limited the last six decades of research into premodern mountain experiences. After all, the traditional narrative suggests that not only did premodern Europeans fear mountains, they also avoided them at all costs. Why study an absence of enjoyment of, and engagement with, mountains when the centuries of modern “mountain glory” offer such rich pickings?4
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