Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour

The sea, the sky, the veins of your hands, the earth 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, eggs, science, slavery, gender, sex, art, the literary past, and contemporary film. Carol Mavor€s engaging and elegiac readings in this beautifully illustrated book takes 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 Ki©slowski 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 color. At once historical, sociological, literary, and visual, Blue Mythologies gives us a fresh and contemplative look into the traditions, tales, and connotations of those somethings blue.