Reading the Beatles: Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and the Fab FourKenneth Womack, Todd F. Davis State University of New York Press, 2012 M02 1 - 261 pages Despite the enormous amount of writing devoted to the Beatles during the last few decades, the band's abiding intellectual and cultural significance has received scant attention. Using various modes of literary, musicological, and cultural criticism, the essays in Reading the Beatles firmly establish the Beatles as a locus of serious academic and cultural study. Exploring the group's resounding impact on how we think about gender, popular culture, and the formal and poetic qualities of music, the contributors trace not only the literary and musicological qualities of selected Beatles songs but also the development of the Beatles' artistry in their films and the ways in which the band has functioned as a cultural, historical, and economic product. In a poignant afterword, Jane Tompkins offers an autobiographical account of the ways in which the Beatles afforded her with the self-actualizing means to become less alienated from popular culture, gender expectations, and even herself during the early 1960s. |
Contents
1 | |
1 I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together Bakhtin and the Beatles | 9 |
Formal Structure in the Music of the Beatles | 37 |
3 Love love love Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Selected Songs by the Beatles | 55 |
The Beatles Exploration of Timbre | 71 |
The Beatles on Film | 97 |
Tomorrow Never Knows and the Coherence of the Impossible | 111 |
Death Loss and the Crowd in Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band | 129 |
The Beatles and Questions of Mass and High Culture | 161 |
Tourism Pilgrimage and the Beatles | 169 |
The Beatles Ideology and the Cultural Moment | 183 |
Lennon McCartney and Museum Politics | 197 |
I Want to Hold Your Hand | 215 |
BIBLIOGRAPHY | 221 |
CONTRIBUTORS | 233 |
237 | |
Other editions - View all
Reading the Beatles: Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and the Fab Four Kenneth Womack,Todd F. Davis No preview available - 2006 |
Common terms and phrases
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