Words, Music, And The Popular 1st ed. 2021

Words, Music, and the Popular: Global Perspectives on Intermedial Relations opens up the notion of the popular, drawing useful links between wide-ranging aspects of popular culture, through the lens of the interaction between words and music. This collection of essays explores the relation of words and music to issues of the popular. It asks: What is popularity or ‘the’ popular and what role(s) does music play in it? What is the function of the popular, and is ‘pop’ a system? How can popularity be explained in certain historical and political contexts? How do class, gender, race, and ethnicity contribute to and complicate an understanding of the ‘popular’? What of the popularity of verbal art forms? How do they interact with music at particular times and throughout different media?

Thomas Gurke is Lecturer for English and Cultural Studies at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany. His PhD-dissertation focused on the intersemiotic, aesthetic and affective dynamics of music and literature in the texts of James Joyce and is forthcoming as a monograph. Apart from James Joyce, he has also published on contemporary fiction, ecology, the short story and popular culture.

Susan Winnett is Professor of American Studies and Transcultural Studies at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany. She is the author of Terrible Sociability: The Text of Manners in Laclos, Goethe, and Henry James (1993) and Writing Back: American Expatriates' Narratives of Return (2012).