The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry - Softcover

Emily Ruth Rutter (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081735994X ISBN 13: 9780817359942

Publisher: The University of Alabama Press, 2020

Synopsis

A critical analysis of the poetic representations and legacies of five landmark blues artists

The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry focuses on five key blues musicians and singers―Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Robert Johnson, and Lead Belly―and traces the ways in which these artists and their personas have been invoked and developed throughout American poetry. This study spans nearly one hundred years of literary and musical history, from the New Negro Renaissance to the present.

Emily Ruth Rutter not only examines blues musicians as literary touchstones or poetic devices, but also investigates the relationship between poetic constructions of blues icons and shifting discourses of race and gender. Rutter’s nuanced analysis is clear, compelling, and rich in critical assessments of these writers’ portraits of the musical artists, attending to their strategies and oversights.

About this title

About the Author

Emily Ruth Rutter is assistant professor of English at Ball State University. She is the author of Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line.Her research has been published in African American Review, South Atlantic Review, Studies in American Culture, Aethlon, and MELUS.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of Alabama Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 081735994X
• ISBN 13: 9780817359942
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 228