Existing books on mountain regions invariably embed the history of their discovery within the notions of the sublime and the picturesque. Mountains move from being perceived as sites of revulsion to sites bearing a divine imprint, from privileged locations of geological enquiry to hotspots for mountaineering feats and mass tourism. While these trajectories remain important for the historical geography of the Dolomites, this study uniquely offers argumentative and contrasting evidence to these almost clichéd approaches through the focused example of the Dolomite case study itself. The monograph shall contradict most of the traditional and recently published routes to scholarly elaboration of mountain landscapes. If the heritage discourse on the Western Alps and Himalaya, the most cited mountain ranges in the scholarship on mountain landscapes is characterised by a discussion of sheer height, embodiments of masculinity, the hero, the sublime, snow and ice, bombastic icons and nationalistic symbolism, the Dolomites, are in fact better characterised by more subtle considerations. This perspective is formed by the Dolomites relative diminutive elevation, their femininity, the anti-hero, the picturesque, rock and stone, and generally more nuanced symbols of transnational heritage and shared identity. No scholarly book concerned with the landscape heritage of the Dolomites exists in English, nor do any publications in the popular publishing market treat their English history in any form, with the exception of some works written in Italian or German by non-academic authors. Journal articles, increasingly aware of the Dolomites' World Heritage List status, often treat their complex history and heritage cursorily and certainly neglect the English dimension highlighted here. The small pool of scholarly contributions unvaryingly focus on hackneyed phenomenological approaches to 'feeling with landscape', for instance, which appear superficially bolted-on to an explanation of the landscape by a deployment of lazy catch-all methodology that renders the Dolomites like any other highland region, like the Lake District, the Apennines or the Andes. Problematically, thorough scholarship on the region is absent in this site-specific context, which is an important issue this monograph intends to remedy definitively. Main themes and objectives " To unravel the contribution of English mountaineering in the formation of the cultural heritage of the Dolomites during the Victorian period. " To contextualise the narrative behind UNESCO's exploitation of notions of Englishness in elevating the Dolomites to the World Heritage status. " To explore the relationship between natural and cultural aspects of the Dolomite landscape, by charting their geological, cultural and sportive discoveries. " To unpack the artistic, literary, performative and scientific aspects of the Dolomite-mania within the cultural and historical context of Victorian culture. " To compare Victorian travel writing and artistic renditions of the Dolomites (the primary corpus sources) to equivalent material from the Italian, German and Austrian repertoire. " To critically mobilise and evaluate notions of symbolic landscape and topographic memory, tangible and intangible heritage, aesthetic theory and visual culture, environmental history, as well as representational and, to a lesser extent, non-representational landscape theory.
About the Author: William Bainbridge is a Lecturer in History at the University of Hertfordshire. He received his PhD in Historical Geography from the University of Durham, and has been a fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and at the University of Edinburgh's Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities. He acts as a consultant on heritage matters internationally, including for UNESCO and ICOMOS.