Blue Mythologies

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 new-born baby’s eyes to Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, and from the films of Derek Jarman and Krzysztof Kieślowski to the islands of Venice and Aran. In each example Mavor unpicks meaning both above and below the surface of culture. In an echo of Roland Barthes’ essays in Mythologies, blue is unleashed as our most familiar and most paradoxical colour. Blue Mythologies gives us a fresh and contemplative look into the traditions, tales and connotations of those somethings blue.

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 new-born baby’s eyes to Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, and from the films of Derek Jarman and Krzysztof Kieślowski to the islands of Venice and Aran. In each example Mavor unpicks meaning both above and below the surface of culture. In an echo of Roland Barthes’ essays in Mythologies, blue is unleashed as our most familiar and most paradoxical colour. Blue Mythologies gives us a fresh and contemplative look into the traditions, tales and connotations of those somethings blue.