Description: On the Colors of Vowels investigates the nineteenth-century emergence of discourses attributing visual properties (color, brightness) to vowels in linguistics, poetics, acoustics, opera, and experimental psychology.
Brief description: Liesl Yamaguchi is Assistant Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley.
Review Quotes: Liesl Yamaguchi's beautifully written and carefully argued book investigates the role played by vowel color in nineteenth and early twentieth century theories about language, from Indo-European linguistics, to French Symbolist poetics, to the science of acoustics. The idea that the notion of vowel color is crucial for the development of free verse as a modern poetic category is explosive and exciting. With clarity and precision, Yamaguchi zeroes in on one of the most stubbornly nebulous categories in the linguistic and poetic tradition.---Sarah Pourciau, Duke University