Popular song is a liminal, hybrid form of cultural production. As a manifestation of adaptation studies, it has lacked visibility by comparison with more dominant adaptation practices, especially those for the screen. This book serves to fill this gap. It investigates what songwriters read and write before they start singing, showing that they need either to adapt material from existing sources or write their own lyrics drawn from a wide range of source texts and personal experiences. They are subject to myriad influences, and among these are other song lyrics, poems, novels, plays, films and hybrid cultural forms. This deep-structure intertextuality is embedded in the cultural flux of language, and operates at both conscious and subconscious levels. This book thus explores the complex and multifarious intertextual connections between popular songs of various genres, styles and eras and literary works, including, but by no means limited to, the Bible and Shakespeare. As such, it offers a valuable resource, by exploring the deep intertextual significance of literary source material for the intellectual and emotional diversity that can be found in the popular song form; the inverse reciprocal relationship, while much less common, is also considered in the study.

Popular song is a liminal, hybrid form of cultural production. As a manifestation of adaptation studies, it has lacked visibility by comparison with more dominant adaptation practices, especially those for the screen. This book serves to fill this gap. It investigates what songwriters read and write before they start singing, showing that they need either to adapt material from existing sources or write their own lyrics drawn from a wide range of source texts and personal experiences. They are subject to myriad influences, and among these are other song lyrics, poems, novels, plays, films and hybrid cultural forms. This deep-structure intertextuality is embedded in the cultural flux of language, and operates at both conscious and subconscious levels. This book thus explores the complex and multifarious intertextual connections between popular songs of various genres, styles and eras and literary works, including, but by no means limited to, the Bible and Shakespeare. As such, it offers a valuable resource, by exploring the deep intertextual significance of literary source material for the intellectual and emotional diversity that can be found in the popular song form; the inverse reciprocal relationship, while much less common, is also considered in the study.

Reading and discussing literature is a central topic for advanced learners of English in schools. This book offers future English teachers a comprehensive introduction to this area. It is easy to read and the author explains all the scientific terms you need to know in order to pass an exam on teaching English literature. Thought provoking questions, a wealth of extracts from literary sources and illustrative diagrams ensure that the essential contents can be quickly learned and easily remembered.

This edited collection brings together scholars from across the world, including France, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Japan, the USA and India, to offer a truly international perspective on the global reception of Shakespeare’s Sonnets from the 18th century to the present. Global Shakespeare has never been so local and familiar as it is today. The translation, appropriation and teaching of Shakespeare’s plays across the world have been the subject of much important recent work in Shakespeare studies, as have the ethics of Shakespeare’s globalization. Within this discussion, however, the Sonnets are often overlooked. This book offers a new global history of the Sonnets, including the first substantial study of their translation and of their performance in theatre, music and film. It will appeal to anyone interested in the reception of the Sonnets, and of Shakespeare across the world.

A fascinating interdisciplinary collection of essays on intertextual relationships in popular music

The Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures is the first globally comprehensive attempt to chart the rich field of world literatures in English. Part I navigates different usages of the term ‘world literature’ from an historical point of view. Part II discusses a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to world literature. This is also where the handbook’s conceptualisation of ‘Anglophone world literatures’ – in the plural – is developed and interrogated in juxtaposition with proximate fields of inquiry such as postcolonialism, translation studies, memory studies and environmental humanities. Part III charts sociological approaches to Anglophone world literatures, considering their commodification, distribution, translation and canonisation on the international book market. Part IV, finally, is dedicated to the geographies of Anglophone world literatures and provides sample interpretations of literary texts written in English.

This volume collects twenty-two major essays by Werner Wolf published between 1992 and 2014, all of them revised but retaining the original argument. They form the core of those seminal writings which have contributed to establishing 'intermediality' as an internationally recognized research field, besides providing a by now widely accepted typology of the field and opening intermedial perspectives on areas as varied as narratology, metareferentiality and iconicity. The essays are presented chronologically under the headings of “Theory and Typology”, “Literature–Music Relations”, “Transmedial Narratology”, and “Miscellaneous Transmedial Phenomena” and cover a wide spectrum of topics of both historical and contemporary relevance, ranging from J.S. Bach, Mozart, Schubert and Gulda through Sterne, Hardy, Woolf and Beckett to Jan Steen, Hogarth, Magritte and comics. The volume should be essential reading for scholars of literature, music and art history with an interdisciplinary orientation as well as general readers interested in the fascinating interaction of the arts.