June 2019 Academic & Specialist Reaktion Books

Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour Carol Mavor


Paperback | Jun 2019 | REAKTION BOOKS | 9781789140507 | 208pp | 234x156mm | GEN | AUD$34.99, NZD$39.99

The sea, the sky, the veins of your 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. The blues of Blue Mythologies include those present in the world's religions, a robin's egg, science, slavery, gender, sex, art, literature and contemporary film. Carol Mavor's engaging and elegiac readings in this beautifully illustrated book are at once sociological, literary, historical and visual, taking 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 Kie´slowski to the islands of Venice and Aran.

In Blue Mythologies Mavor unpicks meaning both above and below the surface of culture, giving us a fresh and contemplative look into the traditions, tales and connotations of those somethings blue.

'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

'Mavor is at her somersaulting best, moving effortlessly between disciplines.' — Los Angeles Review of Books