Tourist spectating converted sublime terror into comfortable sentiment
Evidence
By the second half of the nineteenth century, the terrible awe that Wordsworth and Thoreau regarded as the appropriately pious stance to adopt in the presence of their mountaintop God was giving way to a much more comfortable, almost sentimental demeanor. As more and more tourists sought out the wilderness as a spectacle to be looked at and enjoyed for its great beauty, the sublime in effect became domesticated. — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 22
Categorization
- XREF: Tourism-as-domestication of sublime landscapes connects to the polyad’s listening/observation thread — how the tourist gaze frames land rather than engaging it. — connects to: Early romantic writers experienced the sublime as terror, not pleasure — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 16
- recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
Related
- By the late nineteenth century the wilderness sublime had been domesticated into sentimentality (similarity 0.83)
- Early romantic writers experienced the sublime as terror, not pleasure (similarity 0.83)
- Before the nineteenth century, wilderness meant wasteland and evoking terror, not beauty (similarity 0.79)