The Cowboy and the Dandy: Crossing Over from Romanticism to Rock and Roll

New
Illustrated
1999
$139.62

What is rock and roll and where does it come from? In this new study of music, literature, and culture, Perry Meisel shows how rock and roll joins both Romanticism and the blues tradition by testing the boundaries they share: boundaries between freedom and irony, between country and city, between the iconic figures of cowboy (e.g. John Wayne) and dandy (e.g. Oscar Wilde). In a series of startling juxtapositions, Meisel looks at rhythm and blues, Emerson and the cowboy, urban blues, the dandy and 60's psychedelia, Willa Cather, Miles Davis, and Virginia Woolf. In the process, Meisel shows how popular and high culture are hardly fixed categories, and in fact share deep roots each vainly affects to disdain.

Synopsis

What is rock and roll and where does it come from? In this new study of music, literature, and culture, Perry Meisel shows how rock and roll joins both Romanticism and the blues tradition by testing the boundaries they share: boundaries between freedom and irony, between country and city, between the iconic figures of cowboy (e.g. John Wayne) and dandy (e.g. Oscar Wilde). In a series of startling juxtapositions, Meisel looks at rhythm and blues, Emerson and the cowboy, urban blues, the dandy and 60's psychedelia, Willa Cather, Miles Davis, and Virginia Woolf. In the process, Meisel shows how popular and high culture are hardly fixed categories, and in fact share deep roots each vainly affects to disdain.

$139.62

Quantity

20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Illustrated
Pages: 180
Edition: Illustrated
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 07 Jan 1999
ISBN 10: 0195118170
ISBN 13: 9780195118179

Media Reviews

...Perry Meisel's ambitious and yet playful new book...treats literary Romanticism from Shelley to Willa Cather, and Romantic rock and roll from King Curtis to the Ramones....much of this book may be 'outrageous? * but rock and roll seeks no higher praise. *

Author Bio

Perry Meisel is Professor of English at New York University. Over the past 25 years he has written about both Romantic literature and rock and roll music, the first as the author of The Myth of the Modern, The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater, and Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Repressed; the second as critic and reviewer for The Village Voice, Crawdaddy, and The Boston Phoenix. He is also editor of Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays, and coeditor of Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924- 25.