Blue mythologies : reflections on a colour / Carol Mavor.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mavor, Carol, 1957- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Blue.

Symbolism of colors.

Physical Description:

207 pages : color illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

London : Reaktion, 2013.

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.

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

Notes:

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

ISBN:

9781780230832

1780230834

OCLC:

812688570