Reading song lyrics / / Lars Eckstein.

• Superior document: Internationale Forschungen zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ; 137
• Author: Eckstein, Lars.
• Place / Publishing House: Amsterdam ;, New York : : Rodopi,, 2010.
• Year of Publication: 2010
• Language: English
• Series: Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 137.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (287 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

Reading Song Lyrics offers the first systematic introduction to lyrics as a vibrant genre of (performed) literature. It takes lyrics seriously as a complex form of verbal art that has been unjustly neglected in literary, music, and, to a lesser degree, cultural studies, partly as it cuts squarely across institutional boundaries. The first part of this book accordingly introduces a thoroughly transdisciplinary interpretive framework. It outlines theoretical approaches to issues such as performance and performativity, generic convention and cultural capital, sound and songfulness, mediality and musical multimedia, and step by step applies them to the example of a single song. The second part then offers three extended case studies which showcase the larger cultural and historical viability of this model. Probing into the relationship between lyrics and the ambivalent performance of national culture in Britain, it offers exemplary readings of a highly subversive 1597 ayre by John Dowland, of an 1811 broadside ballad about Sara Baartman, ‘The Hottentot Venus’, and of a 2000 song by ‘jungle punk’ collective Asian Dub Foundation. Reading Song Lyrics demonstrates how and why song lyrics matter as a paradigmatic art form in the culture of modernity.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Performativity and Performance -- Generic Conventions and Cultural Capital -- Sound and Songfulness -- Mediality and Musical Multimedia -- Bridge: Song and National Culture -- Love is in the Ayre (1597) -- Broadsides and Backsides (1811) -- Toasting the English (2000) -- Conclusion -- Works Cited.