The Crossroads of Music and Literature: New Essays on the Muse of Song: Amy LeBlanc: Bloomsbury Academic

The Crossroads of Music and Literature

New Essays on the Muse of Song

The Crossroads of Music and Literature

New Essays on the Muse of Song

Description

Sing In Me, Oh Muse: New Essays at the Crossroads of Music and Literature brings together fourteen original essays from an international, intergenerational cohort of scholars, each taking a fresh approach to the manner in which music plays a crucial role in literary texts and to the ways in which music is itself a work of literature.

The relationship of song lyrics to lyric poetry is taken up in work on artists as diverse as Bob Dylan, Motörhead, Nas, and Townes Van Zandt, while the centrality of music and sound in the midst of prose is probed in novels by Ralph Ellison, Valeria Luiselli, and Ann Petry. The creation of artistic communities is considered through the cathartic lens of Sad Girl Music, the anti-Fascist dissonance of punk, and Chicanx translations of British pop, alongside explorations of turntablist poetics, Black voice versus blank verse, the narratology of popular song, and more.

List of Figures
About the Editors and Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Kelly Baron and Andrew DuBois (University of Toronto)
1. Imagined Audio: Listening to Fictional Sounds
Karl Manis (University of Toronto)
2. Townes Van Zandt and the Semantic Entanglement of Song and Lyric
Christopher Birkett (Independent Scholar) and Eric Tyler Powell (University of Ljubljana)
3. “I Can't Even Remember El Paso”: Bob Dylan's “She's Your Lover Now” as Literary Text
Court Carney (Stephen F. Austin State University) and Eralda L. Lameborshi (Texas A&M University)
4. Blank Verse versus Black Voice: Or, the Problem of the Racialized Reception of Poetry and Song
George Elliott Clarke (University of Toronto)
5. Paracritical Nas: An (Ill)matic Reading
Trivius Caldwell (United States Military Academy at West Point)
6. “Throw Your Hands In The Air”: Wayde Compton's Turntable Aesthetics as Sonic Wave/Wake Work
Max Karpinski (York University)
7. “A Story That Wasn't in the Words”: Music, Mothering, and Minor Figures
Cameron MacDonald (University of Toronto)
8. “Stop Me If You Think That You've Heard This One Before”: Chicanx Musical Translation and Repetition
Desirée A. Martín (UC Davis)
9. Wanton Exhibitions of Spleen: Punk and Post-Punk Dissonance in Word and Melody
Sue Sorensen (Canadian Mennonite University)
10. Beyond “Nazi Punks Fuck Off”: Anti-Fascist Poetics and the Mythologizing of Reagan in 1980s American Hardcore Punk
Cath Marceau (McGill University)
11. Love and Queerness at the End of the World: The Collective Catharsis of Sad Girl Music
Ryanne Kap and Amy LeBlanc (University of Calgary)
12. The Sound of Speech: The Transition from Singing to Speaking in Musical Performance
Kristine Dizon (Concordia University)
13. Pop Goes the Storyworld: Popular Songs for Teaching Narrative Theory
Daniel Aureliano Newman (University of Toronto)
14. Estranged: Alien Grammar and the Ace of Spades
Ryan Stafford (University of Toronto)
Index

Product details

Published	02 Oct 2025
Format	Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition	1st
Extent	288
ISBN	9781978766174
Imprint	Bloomsbury Academic
Illustrations	6 b/w illus, 6 tables
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Anthology Editor

Kelly Baron

Kelly Baron is Coordinator for the Northrop Frye C…

Anthology Editor

Andrew DuBois

Andrew DuBois is an Associate Professor of English…

Contributor

Karl Manis

Contributor

Christopher Birkett

Contributor

Eric Tyler Powell

Contributor

Court Carney

Contributor

Eralda L. Lameborshi

Contributor

George Elliott Clarke

Contributor

Trivius Caldwell

Contributor

Max Karpinski

Contributor

Cameron MacDonald

Contributor

Desirée A. Martín

Contributor

Sue Sorensen

Contributor

Cath Marceau

Contributor

Ryanne Kap

Contributor

Amy LeBlanc

Contributor

Kristine Dizon

Contributor

Daniel Aureliano Newman

Contributor

Ryan Stafford

Kelly Baron and Andrew DuBois have gifted us a remarkable essay collection that considers song lyrics as literature and in literature. The varied contributors write in distinct voices, yes, and also in distinct keys, time signatures, and frequencies of thought and feeling. Taken together, these essays invite close listening and close reading-often both at once. An indispensable contribution to the growing body of scholarship on the poetics of song.

Adam Bradley, Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles, USA