{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.021167415009621552, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.290322580645161, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The making of Yosemite: James Mason Hutchings and the origin of America's most popular national park

unmediated eye saw. Other forms of spectacle were also on offer, from the charivari laid on by hoteliers in Alpine tourist resorts for returning mountaineers to the Alpine simulacra of Albert Smith, mountain spectacle becoming urban entertainment. Part II, ‘Literary Figures in the Alps’, provides three meditations on literary responses to the Alps. The chapter on John Ruskin focuses on his youthful guided ascents of minor peaks in the Alps and the significant impact of these early experiences on his aesthetic theory. Landscapes occluded by cloud combined with his own visual impediment led him to construct theories incorporating notions of the plasticity of the observer and the observed and the necessity of imaginative reconstruction. The argument, whilst persuasive, makes no mention of the older Ruskin’s hostility to Alpine mountaineering, nor explains how the younger Ruskin’s early physical experience, haptic and sensual, was essentially repudiated in his mature aesthetics. The chapters on ‘Gerald Manley Hopkins in the Alps’ and on the valetudinarian Robert Louis Stevenson in Davos serve to remind us that we bring to the mountains our own subjectivities, that ‘mind has mountains’. This collection of essays is, in parts, stimulating, thought provoking and insightful. But in treating the sublime as a linguistic corpus and a fixed category, it misses the intellectual avalanche that in the nineteenth century engulfed and transformed it.