Items related to Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour
Synopsis
Blue Mythologies Carol Mavor takes in the many shades and meanings of the colour blue, including those of science, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Slavery, gender, sex, ornithology, the literary past, and film. Full description
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Review
What is it about blue that prompts a precious kind of reverie, just a sigh away (or maybe not) from whimsy? It's surely the hue of bright modernity: blue jeans, blue-liveried liners on blue seas under blue skies, a blurry blue world seen from space. Of course, all those new blues are now old ones: 20th-century blues. There are blues and blues, chromo-culturally speaking, and Carol Mavor's Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour is all about infinite or involuted meanings, the plunge into a blue that Rebecca Solnit, in her Field Guide to Getting Lost, calls 'the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in.' Blue, in Mavor's vertiginous essay, is not so much an object of art-historical analysis as an energy or atmosphere, the very mood in which [Mavor] thinks and writes. --Brian Dillon, Modern Painters
[An] evocative new book - a work which wanders at will over a world of blue. Mavor's book could hardly be less constrained by its divided subject. Hers is a stream of consciousness, illustrated by a lavish wash of colour reproductions. --Times Higher Education
In Blue Mythologies, Carol Mavor provides her own 'reflections' on blue, as her subtitle reads, employing as a guide no discernible chronology but for the admirable compass of her own affective and intellectual sensibilities . . . Mavor has developed a style that marries the erudition of scholarly writing with the intimacy of a diary . . . illustrated throughout by lavish reproductions of everything from 14th century frescoes to 21st century contemporary daguerreotypes, Mavor is at her somersaulting best, moving effortlessly between disciplines . . . The success of her book is to coax us into having a less complacent attitude to our own contradictory investments, even when it comes to something as apparently innocuous as a color.' --Los Angeles Review of Books
About the Author
Carol Mavor is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. Her previous books include Reading Boyishly (2007) and Black and Blue (2012).
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- PublisherReaktion Books
- Publication date2013
- ISBN 10 1780230834
- ISBN 13 9781780230832
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages224
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Blue Mythologies - Reflections on a Colour
Published by
Reaktion Books Ltd., London, 2013
ISBN 10: 1780230834
ISBN 13: 9781780230832
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Hardcover
Seller: Karen Jakobsen (Member of the PBFA), Sturminster Newton, United Kingdom
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Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. Hardcover. Condition: Very good, with just a hint of shelfwear to covers. Binding sound, no inscriptions. 207pp. Several colour illustrations. This book is a visual, literary and cultural study of the colour blue. It uncloaks blue as a particularly paradoxical colour - for example, blue is the purity of the Virgin Mary, yet "blue" names a film as obscene. Seller Inventory # 007711
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Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour
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Hardcover. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 1.45. Seller Inventory # G1780230834I3N00
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Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour
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Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 1.45. Seller Inventory # G1780230834I4N00
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Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour
Published by
Reaktion Books, United Kingdom, London, 2013
ISBN 10: 1780230834
ISBN 13: 9781780230832
Used
Paperback
Seller: WorldofBooks, Goring-By-Sea, WS, United Kingdom
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Paperback. Condition: Very Good. The sea, the sky, the veins of the hands, the earth itself when photographed from space; blue sometimes seems to overwhelm all the other shades of our world in its all-encompassing presence. Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour presents a series of explorations of the colour blue, echoing Roland Barthes' 'Mythologies' essays. The blues of Blue Mythologies include science, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Slavery, gender, sex, ornithology, the literary past, and contemporary film. The engaging and elegiac readings are at once sociological, literary, historical and visual, taking the reader from the blue of a new-born baby's eyes to the films of Jarman and Kieslowski. Blue as the colour of death, as Vishnu's skin, the colour of optimism, heaven, asphyxiation, depression, the blues, innocence, even blue cheese: in each example Mavor unpicks meaning both above and below the surface of culture and makes us question our relationship with blue. Richly illustrated, Blue Mythologies is a fresh and contemplative navigation of the meanings and mythologies surrounding this most familiar and paradoxical of colours. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Seller Inventory # GOR008690514
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Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour
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Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour book by Carol Mavor
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Hardcover. Condition: Like New. Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book. About the book >.>.> Here is another blue science fiction mythology. It is not a myth that all newborn irises look blue, whatever final pigmented colour they may end up with. At birth, the infant's unpigmented iris contains many molecular scatterers in a transparent medium: that is why we see a bluish eye when we look into them. Newborn babies' eyes seem blue; not because they are pigmented, but because they scatter blue light to us. Once the pigment arrives, the iris has effectively been painted, and its colour is then determined by the pigment's absorption properties; not unlike the blue crystals in the starred ceiling of Giotto's Arena Chapel, which absorb colour in white light, leaving only blue to be reflected to us. The blue sky in Wyoming absorbs nothing, but scatters the blue of sunlight down to us; not unlike the newborn eyes of babies. In sum: a baby's blue eyes are scattered light: Paul Newman's true blue eyes are absorbed light My stories seck blue (duplicitous) truths, which nevertheless ring true. In the words of my former teacher lun Chiford. If we are co. Seller Inventory # Batch-FM350-LN-8431
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Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour
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Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour
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Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour
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Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour
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