This ground-breaking study of three major poets and art writers – Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, and Yves Bonnefoy – tackles a significant lacuna in our understanding of exploratory literature of the broad modern period (1861-2001) and its relation to art and art writing.

As joint winner of the Gapper Book Prize, 2021, this new edition of Susan Harrow's award-winning study of modern French poetry and art writing offers a bold approach to studying the relationship between text and image. Exploring key questions such as how modern writers write colour, and to what extent critical thought on colour in visual media can illuminate the textual life of colour, Susan Harrow argues that colour is integral to the exploration of ethics, ekphrasis, objects, bodies, landscape and interiority in painting and poetry. The question of colour, in a variety of disciplines and media, has provoked debate from Aristotle to Goethe, and from Baudelaire to Derek Jarman. If the past twenty years have witnessed a ‘colour turn’ in contemporary cultural studies and screen research, colour values in literary and textual media are often elided or, simply, overlooked. Colourworks tackles this lacuna in the study of modern poetry and art writing in French, revealing the integral role of colour in the work of three iconic French writers in the modern tradition: Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry and Yves Bonnefoy. This book spans the broad modern period from the 1860s to the early twenty-first century in taking an exploratory approach to the visuality of the verbal medium through an adventurous reading of text and image. Harrow uncovers how colour moves and morphs in texts as it challenges the traditionalist containments of chromatic symbolism. Beyond its primary area of investigation in modern poetry and art writing in French, this richly colour-illustrated study has significant interdisciplinary implications—conceptual, methodological, and practical—for the study of visuality in humanities research, from literature studies to material and visual culture studies.

"Harrow brings her field up to date with a colour turn already well underway in anthropology and film and cultural studies, thus carving a new space for literary studies within the interdisciplinary humanities." - French Studies

"This is a bold and intellectually ambitious project both in its scale but also in its agenda of bringing colour studies to the fore. Stimulating, convincing and supremely crafted…This is the culmination of many years of research, and the expertise, erudition and style on display are quite breath-taking." - The Society for French Studies, 2021 Gapper Book prize awards panel

"A scholarly, detailed, in-depth investigation into how color is utilized in both poetry and art writing…As Harrow shows, color [sic], a seemingly simple word with obvious connotations, is far more complex than we realize." - Leonardo

"Colourworks: Chromatic Innovation In Modern French Poetry and Art Writing by Susan Harrow is an immersive book analyzing color in modern French poetry and art writing ... The writing is dense at times but always maintains its own poetic air." - STC Technical Communication

"Starting with Mallarmé’s ‘monochromes’, Susan Harrow takes us on an extended exploration of the colour worlds of modern French poetry, via Valéry’s greys down to the complex chromatics of Bonnefoy. Her study is a tour de force." - Christopher Prendergast FBA, Professor Emeritus of Modern French Literature and Fellow of King’s College, University of Cambridge, UK

"Through a series of penetrating readings, Susan Harrow sheds fascinating light on the workings of colour when it is mediated through the poet’s words. The subtlety of this alchemical process finds eloquent expression in lucid analyses of Mallarmé, Valéry and Bonnefoy. Harrow’s interdisciplinary study offers a wealth of insights that prompt us to think anew about the affective, cultural, sensory and theoretical ramifications of colour and the myriad ways in which its textual articulation shapes our world." - Eric Robertson, Professor of Modern French Literary and Visual Culture, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK