L'or et l'art

The present volume examines the unique position of gold across literature and the arts in Britain from the end of the sixteenth century to the contemporary period. A mineral like no other, gold is commonly associated with a host of ideas, sensations, values, affects and effects. Its materiality inevitably conjures up a paradoxical symbolism which negotiates tensions between the tangible and the immaterial, the beautiful and the commercial, the sacred and the profane, the mythical and the political, the ephemeral and the untarnishable, virtue and lucre. Both a highly ductile material and an elusive, malleable sign, gold lends itself to multiple uses and interpretations.