Please join us on Wednesday 19th March at 3pm in Arts 201 for a joint event from the Nineteenth-Century Centre and Arts of Place. We’ll be hosting Professor Simon Bainbridge (Lancaster), expert in Romanticism, the politics of place, and mountaineering, who’ll be sharing his new research with us. Title and abstract below; do feel free to circulate to other interest parties. Please not the time and place, which are both a little different to our usual slot. Hope to see you all there!
‘Standing on the verge of another world’: Romanticism on the Volcano
This paper will examine the Romantic-period phenomena of global mountaineering through a focus on accounts of the climbs of Hawaii’s highest volcanoes (Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea). These climbs by western travellers began in 1779 with attempts made by crew members of Captain Cook’s third voyage and culminated in 1840-1 with a 400-strong ascent made by the United States Exploratory Expedition as part of the first American government sponsored scientific expedition to the Pacific. As these contexts would suggest, the ascents were very much linked to the scientific and imperial agendas of the voyages of which they were a part. The paper will examine the extent to which the exploration of what were seen as physical, psychological, geographical and imaginative extremes in Romantic-period global mountaineering undermined or reinforced the climbers’ conceptions of the self, the aesthetic, the world and the divine. It will particularly examine the question of whether western climbers’ attempts to understand and appreciate the Hawaiian volcanoes were influenced and informed by the knowledge and beliefs of the indigenous peoples who played such a crucial role in their ascents or whether the western climbers used their ascent narratives to reinforce wider imperial and colonial power structures.
