2025/11/01 by Emily Alder · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature #Spatial and Cultural Studies #Travel Writing and Literature
paper · doi:10.3366/gothic.2025.0240
openalex publication_date 2025/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/11/12 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Conceiving all the world's phenomena as ‘natural’, Blackwood constructed haunting entities using innovative unions of mind, spirit, force, and matter, locating them in mimetic storyworlds drawn from his own travels and experiences, including skiing and mountaineering. In ‘The Glamour of the Snow’, conflict between the modern world of Alpine ski tourism and the ancient powers of elemental winter produces a seductive, ghostly snow-being who lures the imaginatively-sensitive protagonist nearly to his death on a night-time ski trip in the high mountains of the Valais. This sport, which enabled skiers to experience the winter Alps in new ways, sprang from the same rapidly developing modernity putting mountain environments under pressure. Blackwood's story uses the agencies of snow and skis to explore the possibilities of new understandings between the human world and the natural world, as well as the dangers inherent in the encounter.