Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism is the first book-length work to explore the interrelationships between contemporary female musicians and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, music, and literature by women and men. The music and videos of contemporary musicians including Erykah Badu, Beyoncé, The Carters, Hélène Cixous, 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 pastoral and Afropresentism, Gothic, female Gothic, and the literature of 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.
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
Biography
James Rovira, Ph.D. teaches literature and writing at Valencia College. His books include Women in Rock/Women in Romanticism (2022); David Bowie and Romanticism (2022); Reading as Democracy in Crisis: Interpretation, Theory, History (2019); Writing for College and Beyond (2019); Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms (2018); Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2 (2018); and Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety (2010).
