Peak pursuits: the emergence of mountaineering in the nineteenth century [book review]

The complex encounters between people and mountains have attracted a very substantial literature, with well over 2000 books on mountaineering in the British Library alone. This is a sensitive and well-written addition to the genre. Caroline Schaumann is a professor of German Studies who approaches her topic through insights drawn partly from literary analysis and criticism, but also in a strongly inter-disciplinary way, studying the liminal mountain world through perspectives that range across cultural history, art history, sociology, tourism, gender, philosophy, and geography. Her book is not a standard history of rock climbing but rather a transnational view of the nineteenth-century emergence of mountaineering via the writings and artistic and photographic depictions associated with eleven richly–diverse individuals drawn from Britain, Europe and North America, in a subtle and highly nuanced way. Each writer is chosen because he had a significant influence on future global cultural understandings of, and discourse about, mountain exploration and climbing.