Abstract
This chapter explores how maps functioned as expressions of an emergent materialist philosophy in nineteenth-century mountain writing. It identifies three forms of mapping: the paper documents carried as navigational tools, the texts produced about upland experiences, and the body. It focuses on four writers’ accounts of their travels through upland landscapes: Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Ruskin and Elizabeth Le Blond. These accounts are distinctive in that they highlight how embodied reactions to the landscape can dramatically alter a writer’s imaginative responses. My central claim is that the mountain literatures these authors produced—in a period when the very definition and import of materialism was being significantly re-evaluated—generated a form of anticipatory cartography that understood the reading of an upland landscape as a fundamentally material experience.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge.
Atwood, Sara. 2014. Ruskin and the Language of Nature. https://www.guildofstgeorge.org.uk/ruskin-nature/.
Bainbridge, Simon. 2012. Romantic Writers and Mountaineering. Romanticism 18 (1): 1–15.
Baker, Harold D. 1992. Landscape as Textual Practice in Coleridge’s Notebooks. ELH 59 (3): 651–670.
Bate, Jonathan. 1991. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. London: Routledge.
Boden, Helen. 1995. Introduction. In The Continental Journals 1798–1820, ed. Dorothy Wordsworth, v–xliv. London: Thoemmes.
———. [1820] 1998. Matrilinear Journalising: Mary and Dorothy Wordsworth’s 1820 Continental Tours and the Female Sublime. Women’s Writing 5 (3): 329–352.
Carlson, Julia S. 2010. The Map at the Limits of His Paper: A Cartographic Reading of The Prelude, Book 6: ‘Cambridge and the Alps’. Studies in Romanticism 49 (3): 375–404.
———. 2016. Romantic Marks and Measures: Wordsworth’s Poetry in Fields of Print. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Coburn, Kathleen, ed. 1957. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Notes. Vol. 1. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1956. The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vol. 1. Edited by Earl Leslie Griggs. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
———. 1957. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Text. Vol. 1. Edited by Kathleen Coburn. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Colley, Ann C. 2009. John Ruskin: Climbing and the Vulnerable Eye. Victorian Literature and Culture 37 (1): 43–66.
Cooper, David, and Gary Priestnall. 2011. The Processual Intertextuality of Literary Cartographies: Critical and Digital Practices. The Cartographic Journal 48 (4): 250–262.
Cooper, David, Ian N. Gregory, and Sally Bushell. 2008. Coleridge’s ‘Circumcursion’: Mappings. http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/mappingthelakes/Coleridge%20Mapping.htm.
De Selincourt, Ernest, ed. 1935. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years 1787–1805. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Dixon Hunt, John. 1978. Ut pictura poesis, the Picturesque, and John Ruskin. MLN 93 (5): 794–818.
Eagleton, Terry. 2017. Materialism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Hall, Stephen S. 2004. I, Mercator. In You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, ed. Katharine Harmon, 15–35. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
Hanley, Keith, and Caroline Hull, eds. 2016. John Ruskin’s Continental Tour 1835: The Written Records and Drawings. Oxford: MHRA and Legenda.
Harmon, Katharine, ed. 2004. You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
Hewison, Robert. 1976. John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hewitt, Rachel. 2010. Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey. London: Granta.
Hilton, Tim. 2002. John Ruskin. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Holmes, Richard. 1999. Coleridge: Darker Reflections. London: Flamingo.
Hull, Caroline S. 2016. The Drawings. In John Ruskin’s Continental Tour 1835: The Written Records and Drawings, ed. Keith Hanley and Caroline S. Hull, 167–212. Oxford: MHRA and Legenda.
Hutchinson, William. 1794. The History of the County of Cumberland and Some Places Adjacent, from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time. Carlisle: F. Jollie.
Jarvis, Robin. 1997. Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Knight, William, ed. 1897. Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. London: Macmillan and Co.
Langan, Celeste. 1995. Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Le Blond, Elizabeth. 1883. The High Alps in Winter; or, Mountaineering in Search of Health. London: S. Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington.
Levinson, Marjorie. 2007. A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza. Studies in Romanticism 46 (4): 367–410.
Mills, Sara. 1991. Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism. London: Routledge.
Modiano, Raimonda. 1985. Coleridge and the Concept of Nature. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Morrison, Kevin A. 2009. Embodiment and Modernity: Ruskin, Stephen, Merleau-Ponty, and the Alps. Comparative Literature Studies 46 (3): 498–511.
Raiger, Michael. 2002. The Intellectual Breeze, the Corporeality of Thought, and the Eolian Harp. Coleridge Bulletin 20: 76–84.
Ruskin, John. 1905. ‘A Joy For Ever’ and ‘The Two Paths’ with Letters on The Oxford Museum and Various Addresses 1856–1860. Vol. 16. Edited by E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen.
———. 1908. Præterita and Dilecta: The Works of John Ruskin. Vol. 35. Edited by E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen.
Solomonescu, Yasmin. 2014. John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Speich, Daniel. 2009. Mountains Made in Switzerland: Facts and Concerns in Nineteenth-Century Cartography. Science in Context 22 (3): 387–408.
Woof, Pamela. 2007. Dorothy Wordsworth as a Young Woman. The Wordsworth Circle 38 (3): 130–138.
———. 2008. William, Mary and Dorothy: The Wordsworths’ Continental Tour of 1820. Grasmere: The Wordsworth Trust.
———. 2013. Dorothy Wordsworth: Wonders of the Everyday. Grasmere: The Wordsworth Trust.
Acknowledgements
Research for this chapter was carried out with support from the Leverhulme Trust–funded project Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities: A Deep Map of the English Lake District (RPG-2015-230).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Taylor, J.E. (2019). Mountain Matter(s): Anticipatory Cartographies in Nineteenth-Century Mountain Literature. In: Carruthers, J., Dakkak, N., Spence, R. (eds) Anticipatory Materialisms in Literature and Philosophy, 1790–1930 . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29817-3_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29817-3_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-29816-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-29817-3
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)