Book

The ruins lesson : meaning and material in western culture

Stewart, Susan, 1952- author

Overview

\"In 'The Ruins Lesson,' the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet-critic Susan Stewart explores the West's fascination with ruins in literature, visual art, and architecture, covering a vast chronological and geographical range from the ancient Egyptians to T. S. Eliot. In the multiplication of images of ruins, artists, and writers she surveys, Stewart shows how these thinkers struggled to recover lessons out of the fragility or our cultural remains. She tries to understand the appeal in the West of ruins and ruination, particularly Roman ruins, in the work and thought of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth, whom she returns to throughout the book. Her sweeping, deeply felt study encompasses the founding legends of broken covenants and original sin; Christian transformations of the classical past; the myths and rituals of human fertility; images of ruins in Renaissance allegory, eighteenth-century melancholy, and nineteenth-century cataloguing; and new gardens that eventually emerged from ancient sites of disaster\"-- Provided by publisher.

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Subject: Ruins in literature. / Ruins in art. / Antiquities in literature. / Antiquities in art.
• ISBN: 9780226632612, 022663261X

Item info:

1 item available

1 item total in all locations

Holdings :

Call Number	Copies	Material	Location
PN56.R87 S74 2020	1	BOOK	AUTOSTORE