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Description
How have ruins become so valued in Western culture and so central to our art and literature? Covering a vast chronological and geographical range, from ancient Egyptian inscriptions to twentieth-century memorials, Susan Stewart seeks to answer this question as she traces the appeal of ruins and ruins images, and the lessons that writers and artists have drawn from their haunting forms.
Stewart takes us on a sweeping journey through founding legends of broken covenants and original sin, the Christian appropriation of the classical past, and images of decay in early modern allegory. Stewart looks in depth at the works of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth, each of whom found in ruins a means of reinventing his art. Lively and engaging, The Ruins Lesson ultimately asks what can resist ruination--and finds in the self-transforming, ever-fleeting practices of language and thought a clue to what might truly endure.
Product Details
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
| Publish Date | June 02, 2021 |
| Pages | 400 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9780226792200 |
| Dimensions | 9.8 X 6.9 X 0.9 inches | 1.4 pounds |
About the Author
Susan Stewart is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University. A former MacArthur fellow, she is the author of five earlier critical studies, including Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002), winner of the Christian Gauss award of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the Truman Capote Award. She is also the author of five books of poems, most recently Red Rover (2008) and Columbarium (2003), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. These titles, along with The Open Studio (2005) and The Forest (1995), are all published by the University of Chicago Press.
Reviews
"One's heart leaps at Susan Stewart's beautifully produced The Ruins Lesson: with eighty high-resolution illustrations and eleven colorful plates set in 7 x10 ̋, the book is a collectable work of art in itself."-- "Modern Philology"
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