In Ruins [Anglais] [Broché]

"If I am lonely in a foreign country," confesses Woodward, director of Britain's Holburne Museum of Art, " I search for ruins." Great houses and haunted ones, ruins of antiquity and of modern wars, suburban remnants and monastic shells form his terrain in this erudite, brisk and invigorating walk through lost domains. "Ruins do not speak," says Woodward, "we speak for them." In this compact but capacious book, Woodward brings forth the voices of architects, diarists, sculptors, eccentrics, archeologists, even a boxer. Woodward himself is present, sometimes traveling, sometimes reading, but never as an intrusive presence. Although Byron may have felt "the air of Greece" made him a poet, Woodward is certain that it was "the clammy mists of a ruined English abbey" and the effects are present in his own heightened, engaging prose, which often finds literary ghosts among the stones. From Virginia Water in Surrey, the largest artificial ruin in Britain, to Ninfa ("the loveliest lost city in Europe") and the real life inspirations for the abodes of Miss Havisham, the Ushers and Ozymandias, Woodward ventures to Ephesus (where St. Paul preached) and the magnificently over-designed John Soane's Museum, London (where he served as curator). The Roman Coliseum morphs from terrifying entertainment arena to cow pasture and stone quarry to major tourist attraction visited by, among the many, Hawthorne and Hardy. If "[a] ruin is a dialogue between an incomplete reality and the imagination of the spectator," this book listens in intently.-- ruin is a dialogue between an incomplete reality and the imagination of the spectator," this book listens in intently.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

The ruins of majestic buildings, monuments, or colossal figures have long been objects of contemplation and sources of creative inspiration. They are reminders of the vulnerability of empire, the fragility of artistic endeavor, and the transience of human ambition. Woodward, director of the Holburne Museum of Art (Bath, England), visits the remains of the Roman Colosseum, deteriorated English abbeys and monasteries, neglected mansions of Cuban sugar barons, and the abandoned palaces of the Moorish princes of Sicily and the sultans of Zanzibar, charting the impact of such decay on the literature and art of the 16th to 20th centuries. As images, symbols, or motifs, they have informed the canvases of Piranesi and Constable, the poetry of Shelley ("Ozymandias") and Byron ("Childe Harold"), and the fiction of Poe ("Fall of the House of Usher"), to cite only some of Woodward's many representations. In this penetrating study Woodward also elaborates on the 19th-century European gentry's fancy for commissioning landscape architects to create contemplative false ruins, or "follies," amid their woodland estates. Recommended for all libraries.
Lonnie Weatherby, McGill Univ. Lib., Montreal
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

In 1462, Pope Pius II praised classical ruins for their "exemplary frailty" and issued an edict to protect them; in the centuries that followed, generations of writers have delighted in their melancholy power. Woodward, a young British architectural historian, claims to have been obsessed with ruins since childhood; here he interweaves personal reflections (which hover just this side of preciousness) with historical descriptions of actual ruins—castles, follies, blitzed London, and, above all, Rome—and the writers and artists who have been captivated by them. For the true connoisseur, it seems, nothing ruins a ruin like repair. Rome, Woodward says, has failed to inspire anyone since the late nineteenth century, when archeologists cleared away the detritus of two millennia. The Colosseum was once dotted with shrines and sprouted rare plants whose seeds had been sown from the bodies of the exotic animals killed there. Now it is "as bald as the foundations of a modern construction site."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

This is a sophisticated aesthetic exploration of ruined buildings and the fascinating hold they have on observers. Woodward readily engages readers with an accessible narrative style, seamlessly weaving into his narrative the thoughts of those, including painters, writers, and architects, who have pondered civilization's wrecks. Woodward notes that a shared trait of ruins is their incompleteness, which allows the artistic temperament to fill them in with imagination. He uses depictions of Roman ruins as an example, showing how each artist could see something different in them--a reminder of life's transience, of course, but more subtle expressions are also drawn in Woodward's perceptive narrative. England is his second locale of contemplation, where a taste for ruins called the Picturesque developed in the 1700s, with country squires attempting to create dilapidation if they did not have, like Lord Byron did, a genuinely ruined abbey of their own. Byron presaged the Romantic exultation in the imagery of ruins, an intense version of our own perverse pleasure in them. Woodward's work is a languorous delight. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

?Marvellous proof that the prospect of ruins can elicit the finest cadences of the language? A rich and absorbing volume.? -- Peter Ackroyd, The Times

In this enchanting meditation on ruins, Christopher Woodward takes us on a thousand-year journey from the plains of Troy to the monuments of ancient Rome, from the crumbling palaces of Sicily, Cuba, and Zanzibar to the rubble of the London Blitz. With an exquisite sense of romantic melancholy, we encounter the teenage Byron in the moldering Newstead Abbey, Flaubert watching the buzzards on the pyramids, Henry James in the Colosseum, and Freud at Pompeii. We travel the Appian Way with Dickens and behold the Baths of Caracalla with Shelley. An exhilarating tour, at once elegant and stimulating, In Ruins casts an exalting spell as it explores the bewitching power of architectural remains and their persistent hold on the imagination. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

“Graceful. . . . A brief, spacious and personal book of travels and meditation.” –The New York Times

“A grand tour. . . . Eclectic, learned.” –The New York Times Book Review

“Freshly provocative. . . . Meticulously well-observed and well-traveled. . . . A steady stream of ebullient erudition [and] an outpouring of melancholy grandeur.” –Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Nothing short of a masterpiece.” –Literary Review

“If the painstaking Simon Schama is memory’s metaphysician, the late W. G. Sebald . . . is memory’s poet and its conscience. . . . Among these giants, Woodward’s elegant book has earned him an honored place.” –The Atlanta Journal Constitution

“Intriguing. . . . Woodward’s enthusiasm for ruins is infectious. . . . . A fascinating tour.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“Brilliant, daring and evocative.” –The Guardian

“Absorbing. . . . Delightful. . . . Woodward does a terrific job of showing us the variety of ways artifacts have been interpreted and treated over the years. . . . In Woodward, [ruins] have an accomplished and eloquent spokesperson.” –The Providence Journal

“A handsomely written, constantly surprising meditation upon ruins . . . and the way they provide consolation in the face of so much human folly.” –Daily News (New York)

“An enchanting and informative voyage. . . . Fizzes with felicitous detail, anecdote, literary reference, and art history.” –Evening Standard

“Beautifully written. . . . Contains astonishing facts, interesting digressions, alluring illustrations and tantalizing references. . . . An entertaining, even an endearing work.” –Winston-Salem Journal

“Fetching. . . . Whimsical. . . . Woodward’s enthusiasms are catching.” –The New York Observer

“A thought-provoking grand tour of familiar–and lesser-known–stops along the . . . archaeological trail.” –Archaeology

“Nothing less than a guided tour of the world’s most celebrated ruins as well as a short history of the human intellect as it has contemplated these ruins.” –The Tennessean

“Rich, allusive, learned, delightful. . . . Not a breath of pretension emanates from this engaging, illuminating volume.” –Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Masterful. . . . Well-illustrated. . . . Constantly entertaining.” –The Times (Trenton, NJ)

“A thoughtful book. . . . After reading it, no building will seem safe from time’s depredations.” –Conde Nast Traveller --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Christopher Woodward is the director of the Holburne Museum of Art in Bath, England, where he lives. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.