Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002

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Back cover text:

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‘Travelling Concepts in the Humanities’ is intended as a guidebook for interdisciplinary cultural analysis in the humanities. In this challenging work, Mieke Bal analyses a variety of concepts - such as meaning, metaphor, narrative, and myth - that ‘travel’ from one discipline to another. To illustrate the possibilities of these concepts, she provides examples drawn from a number of disciplines, including literary criticism, art history, and visual studies. Interdisciplinarity, she argues, must seek its heuristic and methodological basis in concepts rather than in methods.

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This is not only a guidebook, but also a story of adventure: we are witnesses as concepts travel into or through visual studies (or the cultural practice of art), displaying their possibilities through a series of fascinating case studies. Returning from our travels we find that the object constructed no longer is the ‘thing’ that we chose; it has become a living creature, embedded in new questions and considerations.

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This lively, wide-ranging, and innovative study will be of interest to scholars in a variety of disciplines, including literary studies, art history, biblical studies, feminist theory, and visual and cultural studies.