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

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Ben Anderson

   Pages 1-24

3. Mountaineers in the City

   • Ben Anderson

   Pages 25-63

4. Mountaineers Against the City

   • Ben Anderson

   Pages 65-97

5. Constructing the Alps

   • Ben Anderson

   Pages 99-138

6. Time

   • Ben Anderson

   Pages 139-174

7. Risk and Danger

   • Ben Anderson

   Pages 175-217

8. Beyond the Nation

   • Ben Anderson

   Pages 219-252

9. The Indoors in the Outdoors

   • Ben Anderson

   Pages 253-279

10. Conclusion

    • Ben Anderson

    Pages 281-288

11. Back Matter

    Pages 289-302

    PDF

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.

• Mountaineering
• Urban
• Leisure
• Modernity
• England
• Germany
• Tourism
• Sport
• Rambling
• City
• Rural
• Nineteenth Century
• Twentieth Century

“Cities, Mountains and Being Modern in fin-de-siècle England and Germany does much more than offer a detailed history of the development of mountaineering and rambling in Europe in the decades preceding the First World War, though it does this extremely well.” (Simon Bainbridge, Victorian Studies, Vol. 65 (2), 2023) “What was it to be modern in fin-de-siécle Manchester, Munich and Vienna? In this conceptually sophisticated and historically imaginative book, Ben Anderson argues that this question, undergirded by urban desires and anxieties, could be answered on the mountains of Europe. This essential work shows how a complex suite of class, gender and national identities made snow-covered peaks no less sites of modernity than the metalled roads of the city.” (Matthew Kelly, Northumbria University, UK, author of Quartz and Feldspar. Dartmoor: A British Landscape in Modern Times (London, 2015))

• Keele University, Department of History, Keele, UK

  Ben Anderson

Benjamin M. Anderson is a multi-award winning Lecturer in Twentieth Century European History at Keele University, UK, as well as a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker 2018 who has published and broadcast widely on environmental histories of leisure. He is also an enthusiastic, if recently-lapsed mountaineer and climber. 

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