Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite

by Marjorie Hope Nicolson, William Cronon (Foreword by)

Overview

To English poets and writers of the seventeenth century, as to their predecessors, mountains were ugly protuberances which disfigured nature and threatened the symmetry of earth; they were symbols God’s wrath. Yet, less than two centuries later the romantic poets sang in praise of mountain splendor, of glorious heights that stirred their souls to divine ecstasy. In this very readable and fascinating study, Marjorie Hope Nicolson considers the intellectual renaissance at the close of the seventeenth century that caused the shift from mountain gloom to mountain glory. She examines various writers from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries and traces both the causes and the process of this drastic change in perception.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295975771
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	02/01/1997
Series:	Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.95(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

Table of Contents

Foreword by William Cronon

Preface

Introduction

The Literary Heritage

The Tehological Dilemma

New Philosophy

The Geological Dilemma

A Sacred Theory of the Earth

The Burnet Controversy

The Aesthetics of the Infinite

A New Descriptive Poetry

Epilogue

Index

What People are Saying About This

Simon Schama

Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory has long been recognized by landscape historians and nature writers as a dazzling work of cultural history: fresh and original in its argument and acute in its critical intelligence. But it is also a wonderful adventure in reading, an exhilarating hike through the peaks and valleys of western modern sensibility.

Leo Marx

Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory is a unique work of cultural history. I know of no book that provides a comparably lucid, well—documented, compelling demonstration of the far—reaching cultural consequences of changes in scientific conceptions of the universe... Nicolson demonstrates the power of abstract scientific thought to alter ideas, feelings, and, indeed, the very texture of human experience.

Barbara Novak

This seminal work on nature and the sublime will remain a classic and a source of inspiration for generations to come.