Jukebooks: Contemporary British Fiction, Popular Music, and Cultural Value

Contemporary British fiction is riddled with references to popular music, quotes from songs, and allusions to real or fictitious pop/rock musicians' biographies and works. Jukebooks takes a detailed and systematic look at the literary and cultural functions of these references. In so doing, it seeks to fill a gap left by comparative literature, which has so far focused almost exclusively on the interrelations between 'highbrow' literature and classical music. Based on the assumption that taking into account the popular forms will have an impact on the received theories of word-and-music studies, the book suggests a new typology that is able to fully accommodate the many intertextual, intermedial, and transmedial relations between music and literature.In addition, Jukebooks looks at the way British fiction constructs popular music, gauging the extent to which current literary representations complement or contradict other cultural constructions of pop. The study thus intertwines comparative literary analysis with text-based cultural studies.