Description: Space and Time on the Magic Mountain explores the theme of the magic mountain in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European literature, especially in selected works of William Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, James Hilton, and Thomas Mann. The magic mountain, an aesthetically, intellectually, and spiritually unique environment, represents a threshold realm at the interface of life and death, time and eternity, where the protagonist experiences an epiphanic moment culminating in a profound and vital awareness of space and time.
Review Quotes: «Thomas Carlyle insisted that space and time are only 'Thought-forms' that hide the wonder of life. Hugo Walter's tracking of the mountain experience from Wordsworth to Mann recovers the great Romantic tradition of temporal and spatial epiphany in which living and knowing expand wondrously. The sites of what Wordsworth calls the 'majestic intellect' come into our vision again as Professor Walter reclaims them in the poetry and fiction of the mountain experience.» (Robert Ready, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey)