Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism

Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism (Routledge 2022) is the first book-length work to explore the interrelationships among contemporary female musicians and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, music, and literature by women and men. The art, music, and videos of contemporary artists including Erykah Badu, Beyoncé, The Carters, Missy Elliot, the Indigo Girls, Janet Jackson, Janis Joplin (and Big Brother and the Holding Company), Natalie Merchant, Joni Mitchell, Janelle Monáe, Alanis Morrisette, Siouxsie Sioux, Patti Smith, St. Vincent (Annie Clark), and Alice Walker are explored through the lenses of the pastoral, Afropresentism, the Gothic, male and female Gothic, and the music and literature of Hélène Cixous, William Blake, Beethoven, Arthur Schopenhauer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Dacre, Ralph Waldo Emerson, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Ann Radcliffe, William Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, her husband Percy Shelley, Henry David Thoreau, Horace Walpole, Jane Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Wordsworth to explore how each sheds light on the other, and how women have appropriated, responded to, and been inspired by the work of authors from previous centuries.

Contributors to Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism (Routledge 2022) participated in a virtual book launch on Saturday, November 19th, 2022. You can meet the contributors and listen to them discuss their chapters here:

Table of Contents

Introduction, James Rovira

1. Are Women in Rock also Women in Romanticism?, James Rovira

2. Jane Williams, Rolling Stone: Reconstructing British Romanticism’s Guitar God(dess), Rebecca Nesvet

3. “Work Me, Lord”: Janis Joplin’s Kozmic Blues, Sasha Tamar Strelitz

4. “All Romantics Meet the Same Fate Someday”: Joni Mitchell, Blue, and Romanticism, Christopher R. Clason

5. “There is no pure evil, nor pure good, only purity”: William Blake’s and Patti Smith’s Art as Opposition to Societal Boundaries. Alicia Carpenter

6. “A Woman with an Attitude”: Male and Female Gothic in Siouxsie and the Banshees, Diana Edelman

7. “Our Generation”: Gender, Regeneration and Women in Rock, Linda C. Middleton

8. “Laughing with a Mouth of Blood”: St. Vincent’s Gothic Grotesque, Sherry R. Truffin

9. “I can’t believe we made it”: Romanticism and Afropresentism in Works of African American Female Hip Hop and R‘n’B Artists, Kirsten Zemke

Index

I’ve created an errata page for Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism. If you see any errors in the book, check the page, and if they’re not listed, email me.

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