ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |7 pages

Introduction

Women in Rock/Women in Romanticism

chapter 2|17 pages

Jane Williams, Rolling Stone

Reconstructing British Romanticism's Guitar God(dess) 1

chapter 3|22 pages

“Work Me, Lord”

Janis Joplin's Kozmic Blues

chapter 4|22 pages

“All Romantics Meet the Same Fate Someday”

Joni Mitchell, Blue, and Romanticism

chapter 5|20 pages

“There Is No Pure Evil, Nor Pure Good, Only Purity”

William Blake's and Patti Smith's Art as Opposition to Societal Boundaries

chapter 6|20 pages

“A Woman with an Attitude”

Male and Female Gothic in Siouxsie and the Banshees

chapter 7|18 pages

“Our Generation”

Gender, Regeneration and Women in Rock

chapter 8|29 pages

“‘Laughing with a Mouth of Blood’

St. Vincent's Gothic Grotesque”

chapter 9|25 pages

“I Can't Believe We Made It”

Romanticism and Afropresentism in Works of African American Women Hip Hop and R‘n’B Artists