Color, Space, and Creativity: Art and Ontology in Five British Writers in Bloomington, MN

This study of color, space, and creativity focuses on texts by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Joyce Cary, Lawrence Durrell, and A. S. Byatt. The author examines Woolf's structural use of color in
To the Lighthouse
and Lawrence's colorful visualizing of place in
Sea and Sardinia
and the
Letters
. Lawrence interprets the creative process in
Apocalypse
, tracing spiral rhythms that culminate in vision, while Cary, in
The Horse's Mouth
, dramatizes an artist's vision of 'the world of colour'. Durrell expands the power of color through metaphor in his island scapes and in
The Alexandria Quartet
distills the city's ethos in a 'cyclorama' that fuses sensations and memories. The final four chapters focus on Byatt's novels, starting with the creative-critical dialectic of
The Shadows of the Sun
and hyper-intense perception in
The Virgin in the Garden
. Painting comes to full bloom in
Still Life
, where Van Gogh's study of a breakfast table inspires a surrogate writer to compare words and paint. In
The Matisse Stories
Byatt improvises on the artist's color combinations and compositional philosophy. Highlighting interactions of color, space, and creativity that take on ontological dimensions, Stewart's study will lead to ongoing reflections on the roles of color and space in modernist texts.