William Wordsworth and Modern Travel

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saeko Yoshikawa
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Lake District ◽  
World War ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
National Heritage ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Global Tourism ◽  
First World ◽  
British People

This book explores William Wordsworth’s pervasive influence on the tourist landscapes of the Lake District throughout the age of transport revolutions, popular tourism, and the Great 1914-18 War. It reveals how Wordsworth’s response to railways was not a straightforward matter of opposition and protest; his ideas were taken up by advocates and opponents of railways, and through their controversies had a surprising impact on the earliest motorists as they sought a language to describe the liberty and independence of their new mode of travel. Once the age of motoring was underway, the outbreak of the First World War encouraged British people to connect Wordsworth’s patriotic passion with his wish to protect the Lake District as a national heritage—a transition that would have momentous effects in the interwar period when the popularisation of motoring paradoxically brought a vogue for open-air activities and a renewal of Romantic pedestrianism. With the arrival of global tourism, preservation of the cultural landscape of the Lake District became an urgent national and international concern. By revealing how Romantic ideas of nature, travel, liberty and self-reliance were re-interpreted and utilized in discourses on landscape, transport, accessibility, preservation, war and cultural heritage, this book portrays multiple Wordsworthian legacies in modern ways of perceiving and valuing the nature and culture of the Lake District.

Wordsworthian Tourism in the Interwar Period

2020 ◽  
pp. 207-238
Author(s):  
Saeko Yoshikawa
Keyword(s):  
National Parks ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Lake District ◽  
World War ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Global Tourism ◽  
First World ◽  
Urban Working

Chapter 7 explores how the cultural identity of the Lake District was redefined and preserved after the First World War through two trends: new global tourism, and the advent of outdoor movements. First it focuses on foreign visitors, including American and Japanese tourists, who have made no slight contribution to the re-invention of ‘Wordsworth Country’. Then it explores some of the new walkers’ guides, including those by William Thomas Palmer, Maxwell Fraser and Henry Herbert Symonds, that were particularly attuned to foot-stepping through Wordsworth’s Lake District and encouraged readers to go back to Romantic pedestrianism. The chapter also pays attention to how the hiking and cycling boom among urban working classes changed the tourist landscape in the Lake District, becoming the driving force behind conservation and access campaigns and the new National Parks movement. Taken as a whole, the chapter investigates how Wordsworth’s legacy was preserved and then rehabilitated in the interwar era of mass motoring.

The First World War and the Lake District

2020 ◽  
pp. 155-180
Author(s):  
Saeko Yoshikawa
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
First World War ◽  
Great War ◽  
Free Access ◽  
Lake District ◽  
World War ◽  
War Memorials ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Great War ◽  
First World

Chapter 5 reveals how the Great War of 1914–1918 produced a remarkable upturn in Wordsworth’s reputation, and how it had an inescapable impact on the cultural landscape of the Lake District. For obvious reasons, Wordsworth’s sonnets on liberty and independence had strong public appeal, and his sense of crisis during the war with Napoleonic France was shared by many who stood against Germany. Equally, Wordsworth’s poetry and the Lake scenery offered consolation and relief at a time of widespread tension, anxiety, and horror. When hostilities ended, Wordsworth’s association with the Lake scenery, combined with his patriotic revival during the war, produced the idea of the Lakeland mountains as a stronghold of national liberty. Twelve mountains were donated to the National Trust to be preserved as war memorials, and public free access to them were also secured.

‘THE MAN WITH THE POWDER PUFF’ IN INTERWAR LONDON

2007 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATT HOULBROOK
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Beauty Culture ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Operational Practices ◽  
Illicit Sexuality ◽  
British Culture ◽  
First World

This article explores the historically specific use of cosmetic commodities as evidence in prosecutions for importuning in interwar London. Taking as its point of departure the story of ‘the man with the powder puff’ told in the journal John Bull in 1925, it moves to consider the discrete but intersecting histories within which cosmetics came to function as a material sign of deviant masculinity, illicit sexuality, and de facto criminality. The process through which a powder puff could be deployed as evidence in court depended upon a particular understanding of sexual difference. It was embedded in the emergence of a vibrant consumer beauty culture in the 1920s. It took shape within the operational practices of the Metropolitan Police, particularly the explosive politics of law enforcement after the First World War. It emerged, finally, in response to profound anxieties about the war's disruptive impact on British culture. In understanding the story of ‘the man with the powder puff’, I argue, we might more fully understand the cultural landscape of post-First World War Britain.

Challenging the Modern

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Attfield
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Youth Movement ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Conservative Revolution ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
Weimar Culture ◽  
First World

This book challenges commonplace conceptions of musical conservatism during Germany’s Weimar Republic (1918–33). Its primary goal is to offer scrutiny of uncritical links often made by musicologists and historians between musical conservatism and cultural-political conservatism of the era, and the accompanying tendentious vocabulary of the ‘anti-modern’. It does so chiefly by means of a critical and nuanced application of the term ‘conservative revolution’, as used in the Weimar era and popularized in its historiography after 1945. The introduction introduces the time-honoured notion of ‘Weimar culture’ and its tendency to obscure parts of the contemporary cultural landscape, not least in their relation to modernity and modernism. Chapter 1 considers the problematic status of the term ‘conservative revolution’. Four contrasting studies are then presented, each focused on a particular ‘conservative’ musical figure or movement, and informed by readings of a complex discourse drawn from contemporary journals, speeches, letters, scores, and archival sources. Chapters 2 and 3 address Thomas Mann and his relationship with Hans Pfitzner in the aftermath of the First World War, and Alfred Heuss’s 1920s tenure as editor of Schumann’s Zeitschrift für Musik. Chapters 4 and 5 turn to the so-called ‘Bruckner cult’ of the Weimar era and its representations of its central composer as medieval mystic, and the work of August Halm—another dedicated Brucknerian—within the German youth movement, as defined and proclaimed by the radical pedagogue Gustav Wyneken. An extended epilogue considers advocacy for these Weimar-era musical conservatisms under the Nazi regime after 1933.

“The Merchants of Tarshish, with all the Young Lions Thereof.” The British Empire, Scripture Prophecy, and the War of Armageddon, 1914–1918

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Michael Reisenauer
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The North ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Subject ◽  
First World ◽  
General Scope ◽  
British People

AbstractThe First World War spurred interest among the British people in the eschatological and apocalyptic portions of the Bible. The general scope of the war, as well as its particular course, provided much material to those who interpreted war-time events as heralds of the coming end of the age. Of particular interest was the subject of the British Empire’s place in the unfolding upheaval. The belief in Britain’s identity as God’s instrument of righteousness, whether as the King of the North, the Tarshish power, or the Israel of prophecy, assured many in Britain that their nation would play a paramount role in winning the war and establishing God’s rule on Earth.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document