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Colour is a problem for poetry, where – unlike in painting, sculpture or film – itis marked by its absence. This absence raises questions that have often beenoverlooked in the study of colour: how do writers navigate the invisibility ofcolour in text? What aesthetic commitments do certain attitudes to colourexpose? And how, in the face of its absence, do we read colour?This ambitious and exciting study addresses these questions, analysing theuse of colour language in the work of Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke,Wassily Kandinsky and Else Lasker-Schüler to tease out how these poetsunderstood poetic production, and how they negotiated the relations betweenpoem, reader and world. Covering the poetry, prose, translation, literary and artcriticism and theory of these and other writers central to European literatureat the turn of the twentieth century, Reading Colour sheds new light on poeticpractice of the period, but also uses colour to open up an understanding ofhow poetic language works, and to ask how we read poetry.This book was the winner of the 2018 Early Career Researcher Prize in GermanStudies, a collaboration between the Institute for German Studies at theUniversity of Birmingham and Peter Lang. «Reading Colour is a hugely ambitious project: in asking why and how poetswrite colour, Rey Conquer offers a tour de force of close reading in earlytwentieth–century poetry, but also tells a fascinating story about how weread poetry – indeed, how we read. Full of fascinating insights and brilliantclose readings – from George’s surfaces to Rilke’s balance, Kandinsky’s redcorners and Lasker-Schüler’s blue rooms – this is a stunning guide to the innerarchitecture of the poem from the first to the last gorgeously written page.»(Karen Leeder, Professor of Modern German Literature, Fellow of New College, Oxford)«Rey Conquer colours the reading and writing of poetry with vivid specificity.Again and again the life of colour words in poems is shown to reveal notonly how the visual fares in linguistic refraction, but also poetological truthsconcerning both modernism and the universal condition of poetic language.»(Michael Minden, Jesus College, Cambridge)«Rey Conquer’s Reading Colour is a unique and original study of the ways four ofthe twentieth-century’s most gifted and influential German-speaking poets andartists (Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wassily Kandinsky, and Else Lasker-Schüler) thought about – and through – colour in their verse. This lucid andpersuasive monograph encourages us to rethink and reimagine (their) poetryin new and exciting ways.» (Nicholas Martin, Director of the Institute for German Studies, University of Birmingham)...
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