Research Catalog

Title

The ruins lesson : meaning and material in western culture / Susan Stewart.

Author

Stewart, Susan, 1952-

Publication

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020.

Items in the Library & Off-site

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"--

Subject

• Ruins in literature
• Ruins in art
• Antiquities in literature
• Antiquities in art

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