Clowns in the Burying Ground : The Grateful Dead, Literature, and the Limits of Philosophy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Coffman, Christopher K.

Series:

Studies in the Grateful Dead Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Grateful Dead (Musical group).

Musical criticism.

Rock musicians' writings.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (263 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2026.

Summary:

"In Clowns in the Burying Ground, Christopher K. Coffman presents an intertextual reading of the Grateful Dead and their lyrics. Coffman argues that the band's lyricists were deeply and significantly engaged with literary modernism. Through analysis of their music, lyrics, and biographies, Coffman shows how the band, as a group and as individuals, drew on the English and European literary canon to shape both the form and content of their creative work. Individual chapters focus on how a particular set of literary texts influenced the band at key points in their career. For instance, Coffman traces the biographical and literary connections and exchanges between the band and the Beat Generation and employs Mary Shelley's romantic gothic novel Frankenstein to analyze the split consciousness of the song "Dire Wolf". Coffman draws on the language of the "literary fragment", conceived by German Romantic philosophers and their intellectual heirs, to identify how the Grateful Dead's lyricists employed intertextuality, allusion, and fused aesthetic fragments to explore the tensions and spaces between permanency and ephemerality. Clowns in the Burying Ground considers the implications of the literary fragment as theory for the Grateful Dead at certain points in their career and in relation to those literary figures to whose works they most often turned: Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Mary Shelley, Robert Burns, Arthur Rimbaud, Rainer Maria Rilke, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

That's when it all began : Beat literature, future-founding poetry, and the Grateful Dead

Just like Mary Shelley : the gothic tradition, the American past, and the Grateful Dead

Clowns in the burying ground : Ovid, William Shakespeare, and the Grateful Dead

On the heels of Rimbaud : Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and the nature of the literary

Like an angel : James Joyce, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Robert Hunter's Modernist.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Part of the metadata in this record was created by AI, based on the text of the resource.

ISBN:

1-4780-6193-6

9781478061939

OCLC:

1564102975