Cloth $35.00 ISBN: 9781780230832 Published August 2013 For sale in North and South America only

Blue Mythologies

Reflections on a Colour

Carol Mavor

Carol Mavor

Distributed for Reaktion Books

224 pages | 58 color plates | 6 x 9
Cloth $35.00 ISBN: 9781780230832 Published August 2013 For sale in North and South America only
The sea, the sky, the veins of your hands, the earth when photographed from space—blue sometimes seems to overwhelm all the other shades of our world in its all-encompassing presence.
 
The blues of Blue Mythologies include those present in the world’s religions, eggs, science, slavery, gender, sex, art, the literary past, and contemporary film. Carol Mavor’s engaging and elegiac readings in this beautifully illustrated book takes the reader from the blue of a newborn baby’s eyes to Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, and from the films of Derek Jarman and Krzysztof Kiéslowski to the islands of Venice and Aran.
 
In each example Mavor unpicks meaning both above and below the surface of culture. In an echo of Roland Barthes’ essays in Mythologies, blue is unleashed as our most familiar and most paradoxical color. At once historical, sociological, literary, and visual, Blue Mythologies gives us a fresh and contemplative look into the traditions, tales, and connotations of those somethings blue.

 

Hayden V. White, University of California, Santa Cruz
“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.”
Publishers Weekly
“Draws upon many artists and writers. . . . This fine, multidisciplinary work explores the color’s aesthetic and emotional resonances from a fresh perspective.”
Shelf Awareness
“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.”
Contents

Introduction: Paradoxically Blue

 

1 Everything is Blue

2 Blue is Joyful-Sad

3 Unwrapping “Blue Boy”

4 One Cat, Four Girls, Three Blue-and-White Pots: Walpole’s “Selima” and Sargent’s “Daughters of Edward Darley Boit”

5 “A Thing of Blue Beauty is a Guilt for Ever”

6 Milk and Sugar are Blue

7 Timber, Timbre: Hearing Blue Again

8 A Bolt from the Blue

9 Semioclasm Cyanoclasm

10 Like a Stocking: Two Paths of Metaphor and Metonymy

11 Blue Lessons: A Patch of Blue, a Blue Cardigan  Buttoned and a Robin’s Egg

12 To Blue: Helen Chadwick’s Oval Court

13 “A Foggy Lullaby”

14 Words Fail

15 A Blue Fawn’s Eye

16 “Blue Albertine” and “Blue Ariane” (Marcel Proust and Chantal Akerman)

17 A Blue Lollipop (Krzystof Kieslowski)

18 “O Blue”

19 Venice is a Wet Map: Tadzio is Blue

20 Domestic Blues: Agnès Varda’s “Le Bonheur”

21 Aran is a Blue Place Where it is Hard to Find Anything Missing

22 In Lieu of a Blue Ending: Un-knitting a Cerulean Jumper

 

References

Acknowledgements

Photo acknowledgements

Index

For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
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