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: A thrilling journey to the edges of the mind--and into the heart and soul of language and literature. Guiding us through famous poems and forgotten treatises with equal ease, Yamaguchi unfolds a powerful new picture of how words work.---Shane Butler, Johns Hopkins University