Stewart, Jemma (2023) Making Gothic mountains: Everest and the EcoGothic. Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic 4 , pp. 28-61. ISSN 2632-4628.
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Abstract
An ecoGothic Everest is arguably a contemporary phenomenon, a lived experience, where human perceptions of the mountain as both monstrous and desirable are enacted through its commodified and environmentally unstable condition. Climate-changeinduced alterations on Everest are exacerbated by commercialism: melting glaciers, thickening air, and corrupted waters as corpses and human waste litter the mountainside. Meanwhile, there are accusations that Dark Tourism has found a home on the crowning peak of ‘the roof of the world,’ as would-be summiteers photograph bodies acting as route-markers, and droves of hopefuls pay large sums to swarm upon the slopes in their summit bids, regardless of numerous fatal tragedies fuelling the criticism of ‘bagging’ this most prestigious of peaks. Despite the contemporary nature of the ecoGothic on Everest, its manifestation is born out of a historical literary imagination which created the iconography of the Gothic mountain, alongside the rise of mountaineering and its accompanying literature. This article considers how the Gothic aesthetic has influenced mountaineering and in fact contributed to the creation and maintenance of an ecoGothic Everest. The Gothic terror of Everest today is not generated primarily through fictional reimaginings of the untameable wilderness, but through encountering the human-made degradation of the peak, consolidating the mountain as a site of lived ecoGothic in current times. By focalising Everest through the ecoGothic, George Mallory’s famous statement of intent to summit, ‘because it is there,’ no longer seems a legitimate motivation behind so-called human mastery of the mountain.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication |
| Depositing User: | Jemma Stewart |
| Date Deposited: | 29 Apr 2024 05:45 |
| Last Modified: | 30 Apr 2024 07:33 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/53451 |
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