The Wind and the Source: In the Shadow of Mont Ventoux (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780791464892)

What does it mean to love a landscape? Why do certain authors have a predilection for specific landscapes? Why might one be fascinated by a landscape in which one would never wish to live? How does the lay of the land fashion the form of the poem? How does the wind infuse the breath? In The Wind and the Source, Allen S. Weiss explores the role of a significant yet elusive feature of the French landscape in literature, philosophy, and art: the legendary, mysterious, monolithic Mont Ventoux. This is not a book about picturesque, touristic Provence, but about the manifestation of an extreme limit of the imagination that happens to have Provence as its site, as its fantasyland. Weiss is concerned with the vicissitudes of the desire to write about a landscape, the desire to write in a landscape, and perhaps most curiously, the desire to write against a landscape. This is a book about love of the landscape, and abstraction from it; it is an account of how a mountain became a myth, and how an aesthetic and literary study became a metaphysical quest.

Author: Allen S. Weiss
ISBN-10: 079146489X
ISBN-13: 9780791464892
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Language: English
Published: 07/21/2005
Pages: 102
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.63lbs
Size: 8.98h x 5.64w x 0.54d