Rewriting Alpine Orientalism : Postcolonial Readings in Canadian and Austrian Mountain Tourism

This cross-disciplinary study combines postcolonial, mountain, and tourism studies to explore how meaning about mountains is articulated, generated, asserted and contested within the global circuits of mountain tourism.

Rewriting Alpine Orientalism is an open access book that explores how meaning about mountains is articulated, generated, asserted and contested within the global circuits of mountain tourism. Tracing Orientalist and colonial legacies in the project of mountain travel across times, genres and geographies, this book presents a framework capable of analysing and critiquing both particular colonial codifications written onto mountains and the interventions that rewrite mountain tourism.

This comparative study bridges the gap between literary and cultural studies and the social and natural sciences with interdisciplinary research across fields such as travel writing, mountain literature, mountaineering history, and ecocriticism, and postcolonial, tourism and gender studies. Eva-Maria Müller examines Orientalist discourse through a wide range of historical and contemporary mountain texts – such as exploration reports, newspaper articles, guidebooks, diaries, letters and contemporary works of fiction from Angie Abdou, Thomas Wharton, Elfriede Jelinek and Felix Mitterer – in a study that enhances our understanding of the role of representation in changing the social real of alpine spaces.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).