Entangled with Colour: New Materialist Explorations in English Colour Writing

Abstract

The topic of colour in literature is usually addressed in terms of semantics and figurative uses of colour. Entangled with Colour: New Materialist Explorations in English Colour Writing presents another take on colour in literary texts. It introduces the practice of colour writing, which stresses the relationality between colour, matter, words and affects. With precursors in fin-de-siècle and modernist literature, a genre of colour writing has evolved since the end of the 20th century with Derek Jarman’s Chroma, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Han Kang’s The White Book. This study demonstrates how these texts create a material-discursive dimension of colour which in turn requires a rethinking of how to read colour. To examine the complex materialisations of colour-matter in these texts, the study engages with a new materialist understanding of matter and agency. It further introduces a new reading strategy, an attentive reading, that aims to unfold the various shades of colour’s material-discursive doings in colour writings. Such an attentive reading follows a postcritical tradition and is developed in close dialogue with texts by Nan Shepherd. By attentively describing the entanglements between colour, matter, text and reader, this study explores how colour-matter makes itself felt in the reading process and how colour writings entangle the reader with their unique colourscapes.