Cities, Mountains and Being Modern in fin-de-siècle England and Germany

Download or read book Cities, Mountains and Being Modern in fin-de-siècle England and Germany written by Ben Anderson and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-01-02 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first transnational history of rambling and mountaineering. Focussing on the critical turn-of-the-century era, it offers new insights into alpine development, attitudes to danger, cultures of time, internationalism and domesticity in the outdoors. It charts an emerging group of mass tourist activities, and argues that these thousands of walkers and climbers can only be understood within the context of the urban cultures from which most of them came. In doing so, it offers a fresh perspective on the relationship of alpinists and countryside enthusiasts to the modern world. Instead of an escape from or rejection of modernity, it finds that upland trampers and climbers contested what it meant to be modern, used those modern identities to make political claims on rural space and rural people, and sought to define what a more modern future society should be like.