Books by Mary Jacobus

A look at how ideas of translation, migration, and displacement are embedded in the works of prominent artists, from Ovid to Tacita DeanOn Belonging and Not Belonging provides a sophisticated exploration of how themes of translation, migration, and displacement shape an astonishing range of artistic works. From the possibilities and limitations of translation addressed by Jhumpa Lahiri and David Malouf to the effects of shifting borders in the writings of Eugenio Montale, W. G. Sebald, Colm Toibin, and many others, esteemed literary critic Mary Jacobus looks at the ways novelists, poets, photographers, and filmmakers revise narratives of language, identity, and exile. Jacobus's attentive readings of texts and images seek to answer the question: What does it mean to identify as-or with-an outsider?Walls and border-crossings, nomadic wanderings and Alpine walking, the urge to travel and the yearning for home-Jacobus braids together such threads in disparate times and geographies. She plumbs the experiences of Ovid in exile, Frankenstein's outcast Being, Elizabeth Bishop in Nova Scotia and Brazil, Walter Benjamin's Berlin childhood, and Sophocles's Antigone in the wilderness. Throughout, Jacobus trains her eye on issues of transformation and translocation; the traumas of partings, journeys, and returns; and confrontations with memory and the past.Focusing on human conditions both modern and timeless, On Belonging and Not Belonging offers a unique consideration of inclusion and exclusion in our world.

The first book on the central importance of literary sources in the paintings of Cy TwomblyMany of Cy Twombly's paintings and drawings include handwritten words and phrases-naming or quoting poets ranging from Sappho, Homer, and Virgil to Mallarme, Rilke, and Cavafy. Enigmatic and sometimes hard to decipher, these inscriptions are a distinctive feature of his work. Reading Cy Twombly poses both literary and art historical questions. How does poetic reference in largely abstract works affect their interpretation?Reading Cy Twombly is the first book to focus specifically on the artist's use of poetry. Twombly's library formed an extension of his studio and he sometimes painted with a book open in front of him. Drawing on original research in an archive that includes his paint-stained and annotated books, Mary Jacobus's account-richly illustrated with more than 125 color and black-and-white images-unlocks an important aspect of Twombly's practice.Jacobus shows that poetry was an indispensable source of reference throughout Twombly's career; as he said, he "e;never really separated painting and literature."e; Among much else, she explores the influence of Ezra Pound and Charles Olson; Twombly's fondness for Greek pastoral poetry and Virgil's Eclogues; the inspiration of the Iliad and Ovid's Metamorphoses; and Twombly's love of Keats and his collaboration with Octavio Paz.Twombly's art reveals both his distinctive relationship to poetry and his use of quotation to solve formal problems. A modern painter, he belongs in a critical tradition that goes back, by way of Roland Barthes, to Baudelaire. Reading Cy Twombly opens up fascinating new readings of some of the most important paintings and drawings of the twentieth century.

Our thoughts are shaped as much by what things make of us as by what we make of them. This title explores the world of objects and phenomena in nature as expressed in romantic poetry alongside the theme of sentience and sensory deprivation in literature and art. It opens our eyes to what has been previously overlooked in lyric and romantic poetry.

Mary Jacobus combines close readings with theoretical concerns in an examination of the many forms taken by the myth or phantasmic mother in literary, psychoanalytical and artistic representations.