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"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 are--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."--Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst and author of Side Effects "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 Mavor'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."--Hayden White, University Professor of History of Consciousness, Emeritus, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Professor of Comparative Literature, Stanford University "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."--James R. Kincaid, author of Erotic Innocence "My book of the year is Reading Boyishly by Carol Mavor (Duke University Press). I have never read a book like it. It's a musing, poetic work, a meditation on the boyhoods of Roland Barthes, JM Barrie, Jacques Herni Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and DW Winnicott. It sounds heavy and dry but my mind was set free to dance and flit by this thrilling mix of philosophy, photography, biography and much more. It touched something very deep in me about what it is to be a creative man." Grayson Perry, Sunday's Observer, 30th November 2008
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An intricate text filled to the brim with connotations of desire, home, and childhood - nests, food, beds, birds, fairies, bits of string, ribbon, goodnight kisses, appetites sated and denied - "Reading Boyishly" is a story of mothers and sons, loss and longing, writing and photography. In this homage to four boyish men and one boy - J. M. Barrie, Roland Barthes, Marcel Proust, D. W. Winnicott, and the boy-photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue - Carol Mavor embraces what some have anxiously labelled an over-attachment to the mother. Here, the maternal is a cord (unsevered) to the night-light of boyish reading. To "read boyishly" is to covet the mother'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 her, but will never become Mother, can.Nostalgia (from the Greek nosos = return to native land, and algos = suffering or grief) is at the heart of the labour 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 "professor of desire" who lived with or near his mother until her death; Proust, the modernist master of nostalgia; Winnicott, therapist to "good enough" 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 the ways that certain writers and photographers take up those threads and create art that captures an irretrievable past.
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First Sentence
MARINA WARNER ONCE REFERRED to my voice, my writing voice that is, as being in partnership with the "new hedonists. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
MARINA WARNER ONCE REFERRED to my voice, my writing voice that is, as being in partnership with the "new hedonists. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Mavor is personally one of the most intriguing lecturers I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. Her flowery, dream-like voice is most certainly reflected in the beautiful critic (and perhaps part memoir) that is "Reading Boyishly". The writing is poetic and thoughtful, whilst doused with a sense of density; her love for Proust and Barthes definitely exudes. Great to curl up to on a winter evening, perhaps not so great for a reader who enjoys straight forward, fact-based critic. Definitely recommended for the Alice in all of us.
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