David Bowie and Romanticism

an edited collection by James Rovira

I’m pleased to announce the release of David Bowie and Romanticism, which evaluates Bowie’s music, film, drama, and personae alongside eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets, novelists, and artists. These chapters expand our understanding of both the literature studied and Bowie’s music, exploring the boundaries of reason and imagination and of identity, gender, and genre. This collection uses the conceptual apparata and historical insights provided by the study of Romanticism to provide insight into identity formation, drawing from Romantic theories of self to understand Bowie’s oeuvre and periods of his career, and it discusses key themes in Bowie’s work to analyze what Bowie has to teach us about Romantic art and literature as well.

Chapters as follows:

• Introduction: David Bowie and Romanticism, James Rovira, pp. 1-29
• David Bowie and Romantic Androgyny, James Rovira, pp. 31-52
• Negative Capability in Space: The Romantic Bowieverse, Shawna Guenther, pp. 53-68
• Drug Use and Drug Literature from the Eighteenth Century to David Bowie, Eric Pellerin, pp. 69-86
• Capitalist Co-optation, Romantic Resistance, and Bowie’s Allegorical Performance in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, William Levine, pp. 87-115
• Too Late to Be Late Again: David Bowie, the Late 1970s, and Romanticism, Julian Knox, pp. 117-139
• Relics of The Future: The Melancholic Romanticism of Bowie’s Berlin Triptych, Paul Steven Rowe, pp. 141-161
• “Rebel Rebel”: Bowie as Romantic “Type,” Samuel Lyndon Gladden, pp. 163-184
• The Goblin King, Absurdity, and Nonbinary Thinking, Aglaia Maretta Venters, pp. 185-213
• 1. Outside as Bowie’s Gothic Technodrama: Fascism and the Irrational Near the Turn of the Millennia, James Rovira, pp. 215-255
• “Blackstar”: David Bowie’s Twenty-First-Century Ars Moriendi, Jennifer Lillian Lodine-Chaffey, pp. 257-275
• Back Matter, pp. 277-298

Individual chapter abstracts for David Bowie and Romanticism can be found on the publisher’s website, where you can order the book or individual chapters.

Check out my iTunes playlist for the book, which lists every song in the order in which it appears.

Cover art by Rebekah Rovira.

If you see errors in this book, please check out the errata page and then email jamesrovira at gmail dot com.