How do modern writers write colour? How do today's readers respond to the invitation to 'think colour' as they read poetry and art writing, and explore paintings? To what extent can critical thought on colour in visual media illuminate the textual life of colour? These are some of the lines of enquiry pursued in this bold new study of modern poetry and art writing in French, where colour, Susan Harrow argues, is integral to the exploration of ethics, ekphrasis, objects, bodies, landscape and interiority.
The question of colour, in a variety of disciplines and media, has provoked debate from Aristotle to Goethe, and from Baudelaire to Derek Jarman. If the past twenty years have witnessed a 'colour turn' in contemporary cultural studies and screen research, colour values in literary and textual media are often elided or, simply, overlooked. Colourworks tackles this lacuna in the study of modern poetry and art writing in French, revealing the integral role of colour in the work of three iconic French writers in the modern tradition: Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry and Yves Bonnefoy. This book spans the broad modern period from the 1860s to the early twenty-first century in taking an exploratory approach to the visuality of the verbal medium through an adventurous reading of text and image. Harrow uncovers how colour moves and morphs in texts as it challenges the traditionalist containments of chromatic symbolism. Beyond its primary area of investigation in modern poetry and art writing in French, this richly colour-illustrated study has significant interdisciplinary implications-conceptual, methodological, and practical-for the study of visuality in humanities research, from literature studies to material and visual culture studies.

Susan Harrow is Ashley Watkins Professor of French at the University of Bristol, UK. Her research explores the interrelation of French literary modernism and visual culture. Among her monograph publications are The Material, the Real and the Fractured Self (2004) and Zola, the Body Modern? (2010). She was made Officier in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques in 2011 for services to French culture.

List of plates

Introduction Thinking Colour-Writing

Part One Objects and Affects: Mallarmé's Monochromes

Colour Culture
Red Bricks and Yellow Thoughts
Making Modern, Moving Colour
Displacements of Black
Migrations of Blue
White (Im)material
Conclusion


Part Two Matter, Metaphor, Metamorphosis: Valéry's Intermittent Colour

Valéry, Vanguard and Rear-guard
'Carroty-Red Bits of Fibre' and a Pink-Bristled Toothbrush
Thinking Art and Writing Colour
Resisting and Revealing Colour
Sense and Sensuousness: Seascape and Landscape
Ekphrasis: Figure and Fruit
Chiaroscuro Modulations
Conclusion


Part Three Emblematic Chromatics and the Colour of Ethics: Yves Bonnefoy's Lessons in Things

The Dereliction of Colour
The Equipoise of Grey
Colour Incarnate
Unbiddable Colour: The Ethical Turn
Acts of Attention
Ethics and Ekphrastics
Interrupted White
The Curve of Colour
Conclusion


Conclusion: Colour Moving Forward

Bibliography
Index