Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism ed. by James Rovira (review)

Reviewed by: Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism ed. by James Rovira Kari Lindquist Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism. Edited by James Rovira. (Routledge Interdisciplinar y Perspectives on Literature, no. 151. ) New York: Routledge, 2022. xvi, 217 p. ISBN 9781032069845 (hardcover), 160; ISBN 9781003204855 (ebook), 52. 95. Illustrations, bibliography, index. In Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism, editor James Rovira brings together nine essays on women's creative agency that bridge intellectual movements from the romantic period to musical intersections relevant today. A key to understanding the book is its inclusion within the Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature series. Although this collection indeed offers an interdisciplinary perspective, with authors representing a variety of humanistic fields, it should be read primarily as an intervention within literary studies rather than as a study of musical romanticism or rock-music history. Given this orientation, the strength of the volume is in its exploration of how women rock musicians from the 1960s to the present have drawn on romantic thought and symbolism of the eighteenth and nineteenth century in their work. Rovira, a literary scholar himself, has previously published on the connection between rock and romanticism as editor of David Bowie and Romanticism (Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2 (For the Record: Lexington Studies in Rock and Popular Music Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), and Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms (Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Following Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre's Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity (Durham, NC: End Page 695 Duke University Press, 2001), Rovira considers romanticism to be a movement in response to modernity that has relevance outside of a constrained time period. With this definition, the principles of romanticism can be a useful interpretative frame for examining the impulse of creative expression of any time. The current volume follows from these earlier works, but the authors offer unique contributions by privileging women as creators. In both the introduction and first chapter, "Are Women in Rock Also Women in Romanticism? , " Rovira states the core argument of the volume: women rockers were not only inspired by romanticism but are romantics themselves. By seeing them this way, readers can understand how women rockers have fit the definition of romantic and pushed against its exclusions. Rovira acknowledges that women's place in philosophical thought and intellectual history has often been fraught with exclusion but concludes that examining women rockers through the lens of romanticism celebrates their emancipation through freedom of expression. The second chapter, "Jane Williams, Rolling Stone: Reconstructing British Romanticism's Guitar God (dess), " is the only one to foreground a romantic-era woman musician. Rebecca Nesvet centers her analysis on a guitar given by Percy Bysshe Shelley to Jane Williams, and his accompanying poem, "To Jane" (1821). While the guitar was an unusual instrument for a woman to play in Williams's cultural context, Nesvet interrogates how the portability of the guitar gave the impression of dissent and rebellion. She argues that these associations of romantic-era guitar playing are still key to British rock today. The volume's contributors then move to assessing key women in twentieth-century rock and interpreting their work in terms of romanticism. In " 'Work Me, Lord': Janis Joplin's Kozmic Blues, " Sasha Tamar Strelitz explores how Joplin lives in the social imaginary as a rebel channeling pure emotion, which resonates with romantic definitions. Strelitz considers Joplin a romantic hero by situating her in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Henry David Thoreau. Strelitz applies their metaphor of "an electric aeolian harp" (p. 63), based on the instrument that channels wind into sound, to Joplin as she channeled the electricity of the 1960s into her music. Thus, Strelitz argues Joplin fits the definition of romantic based on her commitment to expressing her own emotions and conveying those of her audience. In the subsequent two chapters, the authors focus on women in rock who expressly related their work to romanticism. Christopher R. Clason interprets Joni Mitchell's 1971 album Blue (Reprise Records MS 2038 1971, LP. . .