Colourworks: Chromatic Innovation in Modern French Poetry and Art Writing

This book explores how modern writers use color in their work, how readers respond to it, and how critical thinking about color in visual media can illuminate the textual life of color. It focuses on the work of three iconic French writers in the modern tradition and demonstrates how color is integral to the exploration of ethics, ekphrasis, objects, bodies, landscape, and interiority. The study has significant interdisciplinary implications for the study of visuality in humanities research.

Format: Hardback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 14 January 2021
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Colour is a vital component in the exploration of ethics, ekphrasis, objects, bodies, landscape, and interiority in modern poetry and art writing in French, according to Susan Harrow. The question of colour has sparked discussion from Aristotle to Goethe and from Baudelaire to Derek Jarman, and if the past twenty years have seen a "colour turn" in contemporary cultural studies and screen research, colour values in literary and textual media are frequently ignored or overlooked.

Colourworks fills this gap in the study of modern poetry and art writing in French by examining the use of colour in the work of three influential French writers of the modern era: Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, and Yves Bonnefoy. This book covers the vast modern era, from the 1860s to the early twenty-first century, by adopting an experimental approach to the visuality of the verbal medium through an adventurous reading of text and image. Harrow demonstrates how colour shifts and morphs in texts as it challenges the traditionalist confines of chromatic symbolism. This richly colour-illustrated study has significant interdisciplinary implications for the study of visuality in humanities research, ranging from literature studies to material and visual culture studies.

Weight: 748g
Dimension: 163 x 240 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781350182202