The Cowboy and the Dandy Crossing Over from Romanticism to Rock and Roll [Hardcover]

What is rock and roll and where does it come from? In this adventurous new study of music, literature, and culture, Perry Meisel shows how rock and roll joins Romanticism and the blues tradition by focusing on the preoccupation with boundaries that are common to both--the boundaries between freedom and irony, country and city, and cowboy and dandy. Meisel traces the emergence of rock and roll out of jazz and Romantic culture alike as he examines, in a series of juxtaposed chapters, rhythm and blues, Emerson and the cowboy, urban blues, the dandy and psychedelia, Willa Cather, Miles Davis, Virginia Woolf, and 1960s rock. In the process, Meisel shows how the presumable difference between high and mass or pop culture disappears when both turn out to have similar structures. He also reveals how canons emerge inevitably within all traditions rather than being imposed upon them from without.

1. The Country and the City
2. Wilde West
3. Influence and Originality in the Blues tradition
4. The Psychedelic Sublime
5. I Second that Emotion
6. Willa Cather and the Art of the Cross Stitch
7. Miles Apart?
8. Virginia Woolf's Crosswriting
9. The Body English
A Coda on Canonicity and Mythology

Perry Meiselis Professor of English at New York University. Over the past 25 years he has written about both Romantic literature and rock and roll music, the first as the author ofThe Myth of the Modern,The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater, andThomas Hardy: The Return of theRepressed; the second as critic and reviewer forThe Village Voice,Crawdaddy, andThe Boston Phoenix. He is also editor ofFreud: A Collection of Critical Essays, and coeditor ofBloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924- 25.