Mont Blanc in British Literary Culture 1786 – 1826

This thesis makes an original contribution to the field of Romantic literary studies by adopting a geocritical framework alongside more conventional literary analysis to consider the relationship between Mont Blanc and British literature in the Romantic period, with a primary focus on the years 1786-1826. Essential to this approach is a methodology that focusses on the relationship between texts and both material place and the associations of material place in the mind. The geo-centred research presented in this thesis has deployed a range of strategies that has involved mapping texts, experiencing and examining material place in detail, and contextualising Mont Blanc writings within a broader understanding of mountain activity and the realities of mountain environments. Pictorial evidence has been used to support these methodologies and textual analyses. An original contribution is made towards understanding a number of major canonical and lesser-known British writings of the Romantic period, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Chamouny; The Hour Before Sunrise. A Hymn’ (1802) and ‘Kubla Khan’ (1816), William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805), Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’ (1817), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826), and Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III (1816) and Manfred (1817). While a number of previously unrecognised connections between selected Mont Blanc-oriented writings over a forty year period have been revealed, the thesis also presents an experiment that has tested the potentialities of a geocritical methodology.