Music, Memory and Memoir

Music, Memory and Memoir provides a unique look at the contemporary cultural phenomenon of the music memoir and, leading from this, the way that music is used to construct memory. Via analyses of memoirs that consider punk and pop, indie and dance, this text examines the nature of memory for musicians and the function of music in creating personal and cultural narratives. This book includes innovative and multidisciplinary approaches from a range of contributors consisting of academics, critics and musicians, evaluating this phenomenon from multiple academic and creative practices, and examines the contemporary music memoir in its cultural and literary contexts.

Robert Edgar is Professor of Writing and Popular Culture in the York Centre for Writing based in the School of Humanities at York St John University, UK. He has published on Screenwriting (2009), Directing Fiction (2009), The Language of Film (Bloomsbury, 2010 and 2015), The Music Documentary (2013), The Arena Concert (Bloomsbury, 2015), Music, Memory and Memoir (Bloomsbury, 2019), Adaptation for Scriptwriters (Bloomsbury, 2019), and Venue Stories (2023). He is co-editing the forthcoming Bloomsbury publication, Horrifying Children: Hauntology and the Legacy of Children's Fiction.

Fraser Mann is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at York St. John University, UK. He is a specialist in war literature with particular interests in testimony, gender and trauma. He has published research on a range of literary figures such as Ernest Hemingway, James Jones, Norman Mailer, Tim O'Brien and Kurt Vonnegut. His teaching interests include American Studies, autobiography and twentieth- and twenty-first-century war writing.

Helen Pleasance is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and English Literature at York St. John University, UK. Her research interests include Contemporary Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction in all its forms, especially memoir, biography and true crime. She has published on the memoir form and narrative constructions of the Moors murders, as well as writing fiction and creative nonfiction. She is currently researching how domestic needlecraft shaped women's lives in the twentieth century.