Reading the Beatles
eBook - PDF

Reading the Beatles

Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and the Fab Four

  1. 261 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Reading the Beatles

Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and the Fab Four

About this book

Addresses the band's resounding impact on how we think about gender, popular culture, and the formal and poetic qualities of music.

Despite the enormous amount of writing devoted to the Beatles during the last few decades, the band's abiding intellectual and cultural significance has received scant attention. Using various modes of literary, musicological, and cultural criticism, the essays in Reading the Beatles firmly establish the Beatles as a locus of serious academic and cultural study. Exploring the group's resounding impact on how we think about gender, popular culture, and the formal and poetic qualities of music, the contributors trace not only the literary and musicological qualities of selected Beatles songs but also the development of the Beatles' artistry in their films and the ways in which the band has functioned as a cultural, historical, and economic product. In a poignant afterword, Jane Tompkins offers an autobiographical account of the ways in which the Beatles afforded her with the self-actualizing means to become less alienated from popular culture, gender expectations, and even herself during the early 1960s.

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Yes, you can access Reading the Beatles by Kenneth Womack, Todd F. Davis, Kenneth Womack,Todd F. Davis in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Literary Criticism Theory. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. READING THE BEATLES
  2. CONTENTS
  3. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  4. Introduction: “Dear Sir or Madam,Will You Read My Book?” KENNETH WOMACK AND TODD F. DAVIS
  5. 1. “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together ”Bakhtin and the Beatles
  6. 2. From “Craft” to “Art”: Formal Structure in the Music of the Beatles
  7. 3. “Love, love, love” Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Selected Songs by the Beatles
  8. 4. Painting Their Room in a Colorful Way: The Beatles’ Exploration of Timbre
  9. 5. Mythology, Remythology, and Demythology: The Beatles on Film
  10. 6. Vacio Luminoso: “Tomorrow Never Knows” and the Coherence of the Impossible
  11. 7. The Spectacle of Alienation: Death, Loss, and the Crowd in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
  12. 8. We All Want to Change the World: Postmodern Politics and the Beatles’ White Album
  13. 9. “The rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry: ”The Beatles and Questions of Mass and High Culture
  14. 10.A Universal Childhood: Tourism, Pilgrimage, and the Beatles
  15. 11.“Baby You’re a Rich Man”: The Beatles, Ideology, and the Cultural Moment
  16. 12. Spinning the Historical Record: Lennon, McCartney, and Museum Politics
  17. Afterword: I Want to Hold Your Hand
  18. BIBLIOGRAPHY
  19. CONTRIBUTORS
  20. INDEX