The Symbol Gives Rise to Thought

This unprecedented collection brings together a selection of writings on art by internationally acclaimed novelist, historian and critic Marina Warner. For 30 years Warner has published widely on a range of art-world subjects and objects from contemporary installation and film works to paintings by Flemish and Italian Renaissance masters, through Victorian photography and 20th-century political drawings and prints. Warner''s extraordinary curiosity in art and culture is conveyed in writing that is at once poetic and playful, elegant and rigorous, which trains our eyes on the smallest of details while painting a broad-brushstroke landscape of art past and present. Themes familiar to Warner''s readers - myths and fantasy, psychic and sexual experience, the vast and marvellous expanse of the human imagination - are treated in the lectures and articles, stories, interviews and essays contained here, some of which are published for the first time or republished from out-of-print sources. In the first of two volumes, editor Vivian Sky Rehberg has assembled themed collections of texts entitled States of Play, Telling Tales and Technologies of the Uncanny, with an introduction from Marina Warner.