“From The Daily Show’s quip that Mount Everest is ‘the Mount Everest of mountains’ to the copious amount of waste climbers regularly leave behind, Mazzolini guides us on a transhistorical trek of Mount Everest as a significant rhetorical place to reckon with nationalism and capitalist consumption. Do not expect this singular journey of resilience to invite another fantasy of ascent, mastery, and bravado. Instead, if you are willing to follow her lead, Mazzolini will show you environmental, material feminist, transgendered, and disability toeholds—of oxygen, food, telegraphs, IMAX, and money—that will stretch your perspective.”
—Phaedra C. Pezzullo, author of Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Travel, Pollution, and Environmental Justice
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“The Everest Effect persuasively demonstrates how the humanities must be central to framing discussions about environmental crises. Drawing on literary criticism, cultural theory, new materialism, and feminist science studies, Mazzolini challenges scholars to make meaningful connections between the material and the abstract, the quotidian and the exalted, the global and the local. Across a series of provocative readings, Mazzolini guides readers through a rich interdisciplinary field. There is no one better to do it; she has an impressively deep knowledge of virtually every narrative, photograph, debate, and industry related to Everest. In nimble, witty prose, she reveals that the narrative patterns that emerge around Everest have become so powerful precisely because they hold in tension unresolved ideas about exactly how human activity and the ‘natural’ world coordinate fantasies about bodies, agency, knowledge, and power.”
—Stephanie Foote, author of Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
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