Colour is a problem for poetry, where – unlike in painting, sculpture or film – it

is marked by its absence. This absence raises questions that have often been

overlooked in the study of colour: how do writers navigate the invisibility of

colour in text? What aesthetic commitments do certain attitudes to colour

expose? And how, in the face of its absence, do we read colour?

This ambitious and exciting study addresses these questions, analysing the

use of colour language in the work of Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke,

Wassily Kandinsky and Else Lasker-Schüler to tease out how these poets

understood poetic production, and how they negotiated the relations between

poem, reader and world. Covering the poetry, prose, translation, literary and art

criticism and theory of these and other writers central to European literature

at the turn of the twentieth century, Reading Colour sheds new light on poetic

practice of the period, but also uses colour to open up an understanding of

how poetic language works, and to ask how we read poetry.

This book was the winner of the 2018 Early Career Researcher Prize in German

Studies, a collaboration between the Institute for German Studies at the

University of Birmingham and Peter Lang.