Clowns in the Burying Ground

The Grateful Dead, Literature, and the Limits of Philosophy

Christopher K. Coffman (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

256 Seiten

2026
Duke University Press (Verlag)
9781478033202 (ISBN)

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In Clowns in the Burying Ground, Christopher K. Coffman presents intertextual readings of the Grateful Dead and their lyrics to argue that the band’s lyricists were deeply and significantly engaged with the literary tradition. Through an analysis of their music, lyrics, and biographies, Coffman shows how the group and its individual members drew on the canons of European and American literature to shape both the form and content of their creative work. Coffman draws on the language of the “literary fragment,” as conceived by German Romantic philosophers and their intellectual heirs, to identify how the Grateful Dead’s lyricists employed intertextuality, allusion, and other strategies to explore how meaning takes shape at the boundary between poetry and philosophy. From Shakespeare to “Shakedown Street,” Clowns in the Burying Ground demonstrates the Dead’s literary depth and how their most successful lyrics and performances walk the line between creation and chaos.

Christopher K. Coffman is Master Lecturer of Humanities at Boston University. He is the author of Rewriting Early America: The Prenational Past in Postmodern Literature and an editor of After Postmodernism: The New American Fiction and William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion.

Note on Sources ix
Introduction. Beyond Description: Art at the Limit 1
1. That’s When it All Began: Beat Literature, Future-Founding Poetry, and the Grateful Dead 35
2. Just Like Mary Shelley: The Gothic Tradition, the American Past, and the Grateful Dead 64
3. Perchance to Dream: Ovid, William Shakespeare, and the Grateful Dead 97
4. On the Heels of Rimbaud: Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and the Nature of the Literary 121
5. Like an Angel: James Joyce, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Robert Hunter’s Modernist Inheritance 155
Conclusion: All That’s Still Unsung 197
Acknowledgments 211
Notes 213
Bibliography 229
Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag	10.2.2026
Reihe/Serie	Studies in the Grateful Dead
Verlagsort	North Carolina
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	445 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-13	9781478033202 / 9781478033202
Zustand	Neuware