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Local colour is an undertheorized notion. Although the expression itself is nowadays used in everyday speech in both French and English, its 'domestication' only further highlights the need for a clarifying study of this concept, which has come to be crucial in aesthetic debates. From the seventeenth-century rift between 'Poussinistes' and 'Rubénistes', to the genesis of Romanticist aesthetic theories in early nineteenth-century France, to the North American regionalist prose of the Local colour movement; from Roger de Piles, to Benjamin Constant, Victor Hugo, Prosper Mérimée, and Hamlin Garland, this book sets out to map for the first time couleur locale's three-hundred-year journey across centuries, languages and genres. In addition to proposing a genealogy of the concept and the paths of its semantic evolution, it also initiates a reflection on the factors that could have prompted the mobility of the term across cultures, art forms and their metalanguages.
List of contents
Contents: A Pictorial Term Gone Astray? - The Rise and Fall of Couleur Locale - The Transatlantic Journey.
About the author
The Author: Vladimir Kapor is Lecturer in French at the University of Western Australia. After a Ph.D. thesis completed at Lille-3 University (France) and a teaching appointment at the University of Cyprus, he held a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Pour une poétique de l¿écriture exotique (2007) and has contributed articles on French literature to various journals including Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Word and Image, Studi Francesi and Poétique.
