Clocking the view from Arthur’s Seat: some methods to map mountain culture
locking the view from Arthur’s Seat: some methods to map mountain culture
Professor Jonathan Pitches
4pm
Monday 10 June
Stage One, stage@leeds, School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds
£FREE
This illustrated lecture by Jonathan Pitches, Professor of Theatre and Performance will help build an understanding of the many, and sometimes surprising, ways in which mountains have influenced poets, playwrights, writers and novelists. It will also offer a taste of how waymarking and mapping can help drive literary analysis and offer surprising insights.
Looking north, there are twenty mountains visible from the summit of Arthur’s Seat, the urban, ex-volcano in the heart of Edinburgh. It’s a vista created by seismic geological events in deep time and still susceptible to earthquakes.
But the view isn’t just for geologists, geographers or hikers. Each mountain has a rich cultural history and literature associated with it. Looking north from the Seat is to take in a cultural vista marked by poems, novels, plays, performances and new nature writing.
It’s the same looking south to the Borders and the Cheviots. And the same looking from there to the Cumbrian peaks of the Lake District. Mountains cultivate culture.
This lecture shares some of Jonathan’s most recent research for the forthcoming Routledge Companion of Scottish Literature, alongside other methods he has designed to map mountain performance. And it will ask, what new insights does a topographically-led analysis of mountain culture yield?
Rejecting genre and period as primary categories, what might we learn from the construction of a series of waymarked geo-cultural associations?
It will appeal to researchers, artists, poets and theatre makers with an interest in mountains and the natural world.
Professor Jonathan Pitches is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Head of the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds.
Part of a Public Lecture Series hosted by the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds.
Image credit: Sid Saxena, Unsplash