Imperial Ascent: Mountaineering, Masculinity and Empire
The thrills and chills of mountaineering literature have long attracted a devoted audience of serious climbers, adventure-seekers, and armchair enthusiasts. In recent decades, scholars have come to view these tales of prowess and fortitude as texts laden with ideological meaning. In Imperial Ascent, a comparative study of seven such twentieth-century mountaineering narratives, Peter L. Bayers articulates the multiple and varied ways mountaineering and its literature have played in the...
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Bayers (English, Fairfield U.) provides a reading of seven mountain climbing accounts that targets themes of colonialism, nationalism, imperialism, masculinity, and identity. The climbers' presentation of their feats, their attitudes towards sherpas and other local peoples, and the effects of climbing expeditions on the natural environment are considered. The climbing accounts are those the Americans Frederick Cook, Belmore Browne, and Hudson Stuck (on Mount McKinley and Denali in Alaska), the British climbers Younghusband and Hunt (on Everest), the Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, and the Jon Krakauer's recent book Into thin air. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Mountaineering and the Imagining of Imperial Masculinity11Frederick Cook, To the Top of the Continent (1908), the Alaskan "Wilderness," and the Regeneration of Progressive-Era Masculinity172Belmore Browne's The Conquest of Mount McKinley (1913), Alaska Natives, and White Masculine Anxieties on the Alaskan Frontier393Save Whom From Destruction? Alaska Natives, Frontier Mythology, and the Regeneration of the White Conscience in Hudson Stuck's The Ascent of Denali (1914)594Resurrecting Heroes: Sir Francis Younghusband's The Epic of Mount Everest (1926) and Post-Great War Britain755Sir John Hunt's The Ascent of Everest (1953) and Nostalgia for the British Empire996No Longer Sahibs: Tenzing Norgay and the 1953 British Expedition to Mount Everest1157Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air (1997), Postmodern Adventurous Masculinity, and Imperialism127Notes143Works Cited157Index167
\ From the Publisher"Imperial Ascent is not only an important contribution to the field of mountaineering and exploration literature, but it is a good read for the armchair climber as well."\ —Mikel Vause, Weber State University\ \ \
