'Dorothy Wordsworth and her Female Contemporaries’ Legacy: A feminine ‘material’ sublime approach to the creation of walking-performance in mountainous landscapes' in Performance Research: On Mountains (24.2)

In this article I argue that a feminine ‘material’ sublime approach to mountains exists and has for generations but remains under-recognized and on the fringes of mainstream dialogues, which - historically and in the present - are dominated by masculine ‘transcendent’ sublime accounts, encounters and endeavours.

The article enables me to explore how in Early Romanticism the concept of the masculine ‘transcendent’ sublime - an intellectual and spiritual experience that transcends physical matter - came to dominate discourses on landscape. I then propose how, in contrast, the feminine ‘material’ sublime is located in and present to the physical landscape, not as a place from which to ‘escape’ or ‘disappear’ but as a place in which to ‘reappear’ - a process I suggest is transformative and therapeutic. To do this, I show how the landscape writing of Dorothy Wordsworth and her female contemporaries represents a feminine ‘material’ sublime ‘mode’ of engaging with landscape that enabled them to see afresh ‘everyday’ objects, people and experiences that were ordinarily overlooked or on the edges of mainstream social and cultural discourses.