Synopses & Reviews
An intricate text filled to the brim with connotations of desire, home, and childhoodandmdash;nests, food, beds, birds, fairies, bits of string, ribbon, goodnight kisses, appetites sated and deniedandmdash;
Reading Boyishly is a story of mothers and sons, loss and longing, writing and photography. In this homage to four boyish men and one boyandmdash;J. M. Barrie, Roland Barthes, Marcel Proust, D. W. Winnicott, and the young photographer Jacques Henri Lartigueandmdash;Carol Mavor embraces what some have anxiously labeled an over-attachment to the mother. Here, the maternal is a cord (unsevered) to the night-light of boyish reading.
To andldquo;read boyishlyandrdquo; is to covet the motherandrsquo;s body as a home both lost and never lost, to desire her as only a son can, as only a body that longs for, but will never become Mother, can. Nostalgia (from the Greek nostos = return to native land, and algos = suffering or grief) is at the heart of the labor of boyish reading, which suffers in its love affair with the mother. The writers and the photographer that Mavor lovingly considers are boyish readers par excellence: Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up; Barthes, the andldquo;professor of desireandrdquo; who lived with or near his mother until her death; Proust, the modernist master of nostalgia; Winnicott, therapist to andldquo;good enoughandrdquo; mothers; and Lartigue, the child photographer whose images invoke ghostlike memories of a past that is at once comforting and painful.
Drawing attention to the interplay between writing and vision, Reading Boyishly is stuffed full with more than 200 images. At once delicate and powerful, the book is a meditation on the threads that unite mothers and sons and on the writers and artists who create from those threads art that captures an irretrievable past.
Review
andldquo;It is rare for such an informative book to be so evocative, and indeed for such a wide-ranging book to be at once so subtle and so precise. Reading Boyishly allows mothers and sons to be as close as they areandmdash;as close as they somewhere know themselves to be; and allows that this relationship is an aesthetic education of astounding possibilities. Carol Mavor gives the idea of close reading a new genealogy. She has written a marvelous book.andrdquo;andmdash;Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst and author of Side Effects
Review
andldquo;Reading Boyishly is as complete and mesmerizing a work of reflection on art, time, gender, and family (mothers anyhow) as I have ever seen. It is a remarkable and rare invitation to find ways to extend our nostalgia into a positive mode of being that does not close off the future at all but relocates it within desire.andrdquo;andmdash;James R. Kincaid, author of Erotic Innocence
Review
andldquo;From time to time a book comes along that totally changes the way we look at things in the humanities and does it less by manifestos than by quietly doing its work or singing its song in another voice. Anyone taking the time to look into Carol Mavorandrsquo;s fabulous meditation on Edwardian culture and its discontents will not have to ponder such problems as the relation of history and literature, fact and fiction, the image and the text, reading and looking, past and present, and even nature and culture in abstract, theoretical ways. Carol Mavor has first dreamed what she has then deeply studied and then dreamed it again, for her readers. This book is performed rather than merely written. And it shows how to do a new kind of cultural historiography that renders most of the theoretical questions raised by postmodernism quite moot.andrdquo;andmdash;Hayden White, University Professor of History of Consciousness, Emeritus, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Professor of Comparative Literature, Stanford University
Synopsis
Study of nostalgic representations of the maternal, the home, and childhood in the literature and photographs of early-20th-century artists.
About the Author
Carol Mavor is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden and Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs, both also published by Duke University Press.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Anorectic Hedonism: A Readerandrsquo;s Guide to Reading Boyishly; Novel or a Philosophical Study? Am I a Novelist? 1
1. My Book Has a Disease 23
2. Winnicottandrsquo;s ABCs and String Boy 57
3. Splitting: The Unmaking of Childhood and Home 77
4. Pulling Ribbons from Mouths: Roland Bartheandrsquo;s Umbilical Referent 129
5. Nesting: The Boyish Labor of J.M. Barrie 163
6. Childhood Swallows: Lartigue, Proust, and a Little Wilde 253
7. Mouth Wide Open for Proust: andldquo;A Sort of Puberty of Sorrowandrdquo; 315
8. Soufflandeacute;/Souffle 349
9. Kissing Time 367
10. Beautiful, Boring, and Blue: The Fullness of Proustandrsquo;s Search and Akermanandrsquo;s Jeanne Dielman 397
Conclusion. Boys: andldquo;To Think a Part of Oneandrsquo;s Bodyandrdquo; 433
Illustrations 441
Index 519