Reading Colour

Colour is a problem for poetry, where – unlike in painting, sculpture or film – it is marked by its absence. This absence raises questions that have often been overlooked in the study of colour: how do writers navigate the invisibility of colour in text? What aesthetic commitments do certain attitudes to colour expose? And how, in the face of its absence, do we read colour? This ambitious and exciting study addresses these questions, analysing the use of colour language in the work of Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wassily Kandinsky and Else Lasker-Schüler to tease out how these poets understood poetic production, and how they negotiated the relations between poem, reader and world. Covering the poetry, prose, translation, literary and art criticism and theory of these and other writers central to European literature at the turn of the twentieth century, Reading Colour sheds new light on poetic practice of the period, but also uses colour to open up an understanding of how poetic language works, and to ask how we read poetry. This book was the winner of the 2018 Early Career Researcher Prize in German Studies, a collaboration between the Institute for German Studies at the University of Birmingham and Peter Lang.