Research Catalog

Title

Blue mythologies : reflections on a colour / Carol Mavor.

Author

Mavor, Carol, 1957-

Publication

• London : Reaktion, 2013.
• ©2013

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

207 pages : color illustrations; 24 cm.

Summary

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.

Subject

• Blue
• Symbolism of colors

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 181-199) and index.

Contents

Everything Is Blue -- Blue Is Joyful-Sad -- Unwrapping Blue Boy -- One Cat, Four Girls, Three Blue-and-White Pots: Walpole's 'Selima' and Sargent's Daughters of Edward Barley Boit -- 'A Thing of Blue Beauty is a Guilt for Ever' -- Milk and Sugar are Blue -- Timber, Timbre: Hearing Blue Again -- A Bolt from the Blue -- Semioclasm Cyanoclasm -- Like a Stocking: Two Paths of Metaphor and Metonymy -- Blue Lessons: A Patch of Blue, a Blue Cardigan Buttoned and a Robin's Egg -- To Blue: Helen Chadwick's Oval Court -- 'A Foggy Lullaby' -- Words Fail -- A Blue Fawn's Eye -- 'Blue Albertine' and 'Blue Ariane' (Marcel Proust and Chantal Akerman) -- A Blue Lollipop (Krzysztof Kieslowski) -- 'O Blue' -- Venice is a Wet Map: Tadzio is Blue -- Domestic Blues: Agnes Varda's Le Bonheur -- Aran is a Blue Place Where it is Hard to Find Anything Missing -- In Lieu of a Blue Ending: Un-Knitting a Cerulean Jumper

ISBN

• 9781780230832 (hbk.)
• 1780230834 (hbk.)

OCLC

• 812688570
• SCSB-12205834

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library