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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stewart, Susan, 1952- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ruins in literature.

Ruins in art.

Antiquities in literature.

Antiquities in art.

Physical Description:

xiv, 378 pages, 4 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some colored) ; 26 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020.

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 ancientEgyptians 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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction: 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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Athenaeum copy: Schaffer fund bookplate.

Other Format:

ebook version :

ISBN:

9780226632612

022663261X

OCLC:

1089909117