«Geographies of reception» of the alpine geographical imaginations: renderings and narratives of Sierra Nevada (19th century)
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Abstract
Geographical imaginations of Sierra Nevada have not been investigated yet from a hermeneutic perspective within the frame of Cultural Geography. This article examines one of those imaginations, namely that created by the Anglo-Saxon travelers of the Romantic period. Through the analysis and the cultural contextualization of diverse images and narratives of Sierra Nevada, appeared in the nineteenth-century British travel accounts, the article examines the metaphors that carved out such a landscape imaginary, the global discourses from which they arose, and the interconnections between them. In so doing, the paper aims to place the meanings of the visions of Sierra Nevada within the global context of the knowledge of European high mountain. Thus, the article shows how the aesthetic patterns and conventional narratives of mountain landscapes, previously employed in the symbolic acquaintance of the Alps, travelled across time and space through different cultural media, and were reinterpreted in the descriptions of Sierra Nevada. The paper thus suggests a hermeneutic analysis of the representations of the massif in relation to recent debates on «geographies of reception» of landscape.