Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism

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.

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).