On Color

David Scott Kastan, the George M. Bodman Professor of English, and Stephen Farthing, artist

(Yale University Press)

Our lives are saturated by color. We live in a world of vivid colors, and color marks our psychological and social existence. But for all color’s inescapability, we don’t know much about it. In this book, David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing offer an exploration of one of the least understood aspects of everyday experience.

Kastan and Farthing, a scholar and a painter, respectively, investigate color from numerous perspectives: literary, historical, cultural, anthropological, philosophical, art historical, political, and scientific. In 10 wide-ranging chapters, each devoted to a different color, they examine the various ways colors have shaped and continue to shape our social and moral imaginations. Each individual color becomes the focal point for a consideration of one of the ways in which color appears and matters in our lives.