Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour - Hardcover

Mavor, Carol

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1780230834 ISBN 13: 9781780230832

Verlag: Reaktion Books, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Book by Mavor Carol

Über diesen Titel

Críticas

"Carol Mavor's work is the closest to that of Roland Barthes we are ever likely to have. What I like about it is that it is as 'artistic' as the art which is its subject matter. Carol Mavor not only studies 'blue, ' she bleeds it."--Hayden V. White, University of California, Santa Cruz "Draws upon many artists and writers. . . . This fine, multidisciplinary work explores the color's aesthetic and emotional resonances from a fresh perspective."--Publishers Weekly "[An] evocative new book--a work which wanders at will over a world of blue. Mavor's book could hardly be less constrained by its divided subject. Hers is a stream of consciousness, illustrated by a lavish wash of colour reproductions."--Times Higher Education "Mavor offers an engaging and poetic exploration of the color blue. Like Joseph Cornell assembling one of his boxes, Mavor articulates this metaphorical exploration in a series of short chapters. As expected, the symbolic meanings and psychological effects of the color are introduced. Less expected is the wide range of media, including literature; music; poetry; film; objects; places; and individuals. Theory, notably that of Roland Barthes (whose Mythologies inspired the book's structure), is integrated skillfully." --Choice "Mavor pushes her intuitions and interpretations further than they want ?to go, so that they come back breathless and bruised, with new tales to tell...Blue Mythologies is ?an act of enchantment--of author and reader alike." --Brian Dillon "Modern Painters " "In Blue Mythologies, Carol Mavor provides her own 'reflections' on blue, as her subtitle reads, employing as a guide no discernible chronology but for the admirable compass of her own affective and intellectual sensibilities. . . . Mavor has developed a style that marries the erudition of scholarly writing with the intimacy of a diary. . . . In twenty-two chapters, illustrated throughout by lavish reproductions of everything from fourteenth-century frescoes to twenty-first-century contemporary daguerreotypes, Mavor is at her somersaulting best, moving effortlessly between disciplines and interpretive paradigms. . . . The success of her book is to coax us into having a less complacent attitude to our own contradictory investments, even when it comes to something as apparently innocuous as a color."--Dylan J. Montanari "Los Angeles Review of Books " "Describing a color is the challenge Carol Mavor takes up in Blue Mythologies, and more obliquely in Black and Blue, and she does it beautifully. These two books are the latest blossoms Mavor has cultivated, works that confirm the tenderness of her critical passions. She is a kissing cousin of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Susan Stewart, in her attention to touch and affect, in her sensitivity to her own emotions and sense perceptions in her apprehension of art."--Critical Quarterly "In Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour, Carol Mavor moves between mediums and centuries, examining Paul Gaugin's paintings, Marcel Proust's writings, the films of French director Agnes Varda, and much more. Fifty-nine color plates add lush visuals and the blue ribbon marker is a nice touch."--Boston Globe "Carol Mavor's quirky Blue Mythologies reveals an inherently paradoxical color. . . . An exciting literary treasure hunt that maps out the color blue as a pathway to experience and memory."--Shelf Awareness

Reseña del editor

The sea, the sky, the veins of the hands, the earth itself when photographed from space; blue sometimes seems to overwhelm all the other shades of our world in its all-encompassing presence. Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour presents a series of explorations of the colour blue, echoing Roland Barthes' 'Mythologies' essays. The blues of Blue Mythologies include science, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Slavery, gender, sex, ornithology, the literary past, and contemporary film. The engaging and elegiac readings are at once sociological, literary, historical and visual, taking the reader from the blue of a new-born baby's eyes to the films of Jarman and Kieslowski. Blue as the colour of death, as Vishnu's skin, the colour of optimism, heaven, asphyxiation, depression, the blues, innocence, even blue cheese: in each example Mavor unpicks meaning both above and below the surface of culture and makes us question our relationship with blue. Richly illustrated, Blue Mythologies is a fresh and contemplative navigation of the meanings and mythologies surrounding this most familiar and paradoxical of colours.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Reaktion Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1780230834
• ISBN 13: 9781780230832
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Sprache: Englisch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224