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The Culture of Yellow
Or, The Visual Politics of Late Modernity
E-Book: 229 pages
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This is the first book to explore the cultural significance of the color yellow, showing how its psychological and aesthetic value marked and shaped many of the intellectual, political, and artistic currents of late modernity. It contends that yellow functions during this period primarily as a color of stigma and scandal.
Yellow stigmatization has had a long history: it goes back to the Middle Ages when Jews and prostitutes were forced to wear yellow signs to emphasize their marginal status. Although scholars have commented on these associations in particular contexts, Sabine Doran offers the first overarching account of how yellow connects disparate cultural phenomena, such as turn-of-the-century decadence (the “yellow nineties”), the rise of mass media (“yellow journalism”), mass immigration from Asia (“the yellow peril”), and mass stigmatization (the yellow star that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany).
The Culture of Yellow combines cultural history with innovative readings of literary texts and visual artworks, providing a multilayered account of the unique role played by the color yellow in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and European culture.
Review
“What do Vincent Van Gogh, Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, Tristan Corbière, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust all have in common? Yellow! Through yellow-tinted lenses, Sabine Doran’s brilliant and wonderfully suggestive book uncovers the cultural unconscious of late modernity―in all its glory and abjection, its epiphanic radiance and indelible stigmata.”
―Jean-Michel Rabaté, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania, USA, and Managing Editor of the Journal of Modern Literature
“In this fascinating book, Sabine Doran invites us to contemplate the amazing variety of uses and meanings the color yellow has acquired in its long history and particularly in the late-modern period. This is not just a compendium of literary and artistic cases in which yellow takes on a powerful significance. It also offers a telling critique of cultural color theory and conceptions of color symbolism that will be inspiring to scholars in many fields.”
―W. J. T. Mitchell, Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and English, University of Chicago, USA, editor of Critical Inquiry
About the Author
Sabine Doran is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature and Director of the German Program at the University of California, Riverside, USA. She pursued her doctoral studies at Stanford University, USA, where she was a visiting researcher in the Department of Comparative Literature from 1996 to 1999, and at the Free University of Berlin, Germany, where she earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 2004. She has also taught at Oberlin College (2003-04) and at the Summer University of the Free University of Berlin. Her published work includes articles on film, film theory, German literature, and color, in such journals as Gegenwartsliteratur and The Comparatist.