Vibrant environments: the feel of color from the white whale to the red wheelbarrow ...

• Main Author: Gaskill, Nicholas
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 2010
• Subjects: White whale
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.17615/j8pn-jy07; https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/concern/dissertations/gf06g287w?locale=en

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, a host of color media technologies combined with new theories of embodied perception to alter both the types of color experiences commonly available and the general understanding of their significance. Synthetic colors brightened all manner of manufactured goods, from textiles and tin can labels to candy and oil paints, and these colored materials sparked a flurry of interest in the sensory and affective impact of cultural environments. This dissertation argues that the discourses and practices of modern color in the U.S. guided literary writers in experimenting with the effects of textual environments on readers and in demonstrating, through these investigations, the role of aesthetic experience in the extra-artistic realms of commerce, political reform, and education. At issue in each of these areas is the formation of individual subjects--and the groups they might create--through interactions with an arranged material environment. Color, more so than other ...