Rock and Romanticism

Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2

James Rovira

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2018
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781498553841
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Theory & Appreciation

Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2 is an edited anthology that seeks to explain just how rock and roll is a Romantic phenomenon that sheds light, retrospectively, on what literary Romanticism was at its different points of origin and on what it has become in the present. This anthology allows Byron and Wollstonecraft to speak back to contemporary theories of Romanticism through Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. Relying on Löwy and Sayre's Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, it explores how hostility, loss, and longing for unity are particularly appropriate terms for classic rock as well as the origins of these emotions. In essays ranging from Bob Dylan to Blackberry Smoke, this work examines how rock and roll expands, interprets, restates, interrogates, and conflicts with literary Romanticism, all the while understanding that as a term "rock and roll" in reference to popular music from the late 1940s through the early 2000s is every bit as contradictory and difficult to define as the word Romanticism itself.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Tangled Up in Blake
• Romanticism in the Park
• William Blake
• Digging at the Roots
• “Tangle of Matter and Ghost”
• The Inner Revolution(s) of Wordsworth and the Beatles
• “When the Light that’s Lost within Us Reaches the Sky”
• “Swimming Against the Stream”
• Wordsworth’s “Michael,” the Georgic, and Blackberry Smoke
• Wordsworth on the Radio
• The Scapigliatura and Poètes Maudits in the Songs of Piero Ciampi (1934–1980)
• Index
• About the Editor and Contributors