Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour - Couverture rigide

Mavor, Carol

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1780230834 ISBN 13 : 9781780230832

Editeur : Reaktion Books, 2013

Synopsis

Blue Mythologies Carol Mavor takes in the many shades and meanings of the colour blue, including those of science, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Slavery, gender, sex, ornithology, the literary past, and film. Full description

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

What is it about blue that prompts a precious kind of reverie, just a sigh away (or maybe not) from whimsy? It's surely the hue of bright modernity: blue jeans, blue-liveried liners on blue seas under blue skies, a blurry blue world seen from space. Of course, all those new blues are now old ones: 20th-century blues. There are blues and blues, chromo-culturally speaking, and Carol Mavor's Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour is all about infinite or involuted meanings, the plunge into a blue that Rebecca Solnit, in her Field Guide to Getting Lost, calls 'the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in.' Blue, in Mavor's vertiginous essay, is not so much an object of art-historical analysis as an energy or atmosphere, the very mood in which [Mavor] thinks and writes. --Brian Dillon, Modern Painters

[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

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 . . . illustrated throughout by lavish reproductions of everything from 14th century frescoes to 21st century contemporary daguerreotypes, Mavor is at her somersaulting best, moving effortlessly between disciplines . . . 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.' --Los Angeles Review of Books

Présentation de l'éditeur :

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.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Reaktion Books
• Date d'édition: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1780230834
• ISBN 13: 9781780230832
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 224