Research Catalog
The ruins lesson : meaning and material in western culture
- Title
- The ruins lesson : meaning and material in western culture / Susan Stewart.
- Author
- Stewart, Susan, 1952-
- Publication
- Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020.
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| Status | Format | Access | Call Number | Item Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Schwarzman Building to submit a request in person. | Text | Use in library | JFF 20-1084 | Schwarzman Building - Main Reading Room 315 |
Details
- Description
- xiv, 378 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color); 26 cm
- Summary
- "In 'The Ruins Lesson,' the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet-critic Susan Stewart explores the West's fascination with ruins in literature, visual art, and architecture, covering a vast chronological and geographical range from the ancient Egyptians to T. S. Eliot. In the multiplication of images of ruins, artists, and writers she surveys, Stewart shows how these thinkers struggled to recover lessons out of the fragility or our cultural remains. She tries to understand the appeal in the West of ruins and ruination, particularly Roman ruins, in the work and thought of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth, whom she returns to throughout the book. Her sweeping, deeply felt study encompasses the founding legends of broken covenants and original sin; Christian transformations of the classical past; the myths and rituals of human fertility; images of ruins in Renaissance allegory, eighteenth-century melancholy, and nineteenth-century cataloguing; and new gardens that eventually emerged from ancient sites of disaster"--
- Subjects
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references (pages [277]-353) and index.
- Contents
- Valuing ruin -- Matter : this ruined earth -- Marks : inscriptions and spolia -- Mater : nymphs, virgins, and whores-on the ruin of women -- Matrix : humanism and the rise of the ruins print -- Model : the architectural imaginary -- Mirrors : the voyages and fantasies of the ruins craze -- The unfinished : on the nonfinality of certain works of art -- Resisting ruin : the decay of monuments and the promises of language.
- Call Number
- JFF 20-1084
- ISBN
- 9780226632612
- 022663261X
- 9780226632759 (canceled/invalid)
- LCCN
- 2019030168
- OCLC
- 1089909117
- Author
- Stewart, Susan, 1952- author.
- Title
- The ruins lesson : meaning and material in western culture / Susan Stewart.
- Publisher
- Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020.
- Type of Content
- text
- Type of Medium
- unmediated
- Type of Carrier
- volume
- Bibliography
- Includes bibliographical references (pages [277]-353) and index.
- Other Form:
- ebook version : 9780226632759
- Research Call Number
- JFF 20-1084