Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory

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. -- Simon Schama, author of Landscape and Memory 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. -- Leo Marx, author of The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America This seminal work on nature and the sublime will remain a classic and a source of inspiration for generations to come. -- Barbara Novak, author of Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875

Considers the intellectual renaissance at the close of the 17th century that caused the shift in the portrayals and perceptions of mountains in prose and poetry, from ugly protuberances to glorious heights. Examines various writers from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, and traces both the causes

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.