Description
Book SynopsisThis study of color, space, and creativity focuses on texts by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Joyce Cary, Lawrence Durrell, and A. S. Byatt. The author examines Woolf's structural use of color in To the Lighthouse and Lawrence's colorful visualizing of place in Sea and Sardinia and the Letters. Lawrence interprets the creative process in Apocalypse, tracing spiral rhythms that culminate in vision, while Cary, in The Horse's Mouth, dramatizes an artist's vision of 'the world of colour'. Durrell expands the power of color through metaphor in his island scapes and in The Alexandria Quartet distills the city's ethos in a 'cyclorama' that fuses sensations and memories. The final four chapters focus on Byatt's novels, starting with the creative-critical dialectic of The Shadows of the Sun and hyper-intense perception in The Virgin in the Garden. Painting comes to full bloom in Still Life, where Van Gogh's study of a breakfast table inspires a surrogate writer to compare words and paint. In The Matisse Stories Byatt improvises on the artist's color combinations and compositional philosophy. Highlighting interactions of color, space, and creativity that take on ontological dimensions, Stewart's study will lead to ongoing reflections on the roles of color and space in modernist texts.
Trade ReviewStewart makes use of an impressive array of theory…. Stewart is a superb close reader, and he writes with both clarity and lucidity. The book is filled with quotations from the various texts, but the analysis always generates an effective momentum. Stewart skillfully organizes an enormous array of detail…. Stewart demonstrates how all five of his writers 'express color and space in verbal imagery that vies with painting; their fascination with the sister art accentuates sensory perception and creativity.' Color, Space, and Criticism sends the reader back to Stewart's novelists with a heightened awareness of the visual and painterly aspects of the art of fiction. * D. H. Lawrence Review *
These five writers, displaying the ontological dimensions of color and space, move writing so close to painting that the two forms energize each other. The value of juxtaposing these writers is that one can see, more clearly than before, how modern sensibilities, rejecting Victorian didacticism, can tune the music of language to the pitch of artistic perfection. Jack Stewart’s book excels at locating the intricate designs of writers whose imaginative work, at its best, captures the intimacy of metaphor, meaning, and music. His book is the bounty of a lifetime of admirable scholarship. * Modern Philology *
