Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession - Hardcover

Marcus, Greil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385417187 ISBN 13: 9780385417181

Publisher: Doubleday, 1991

Synopsis

A look at the cultural obsession with Elvis Presley describes how many of his fans could not come to terms with his death and, thus, remade history

About this title

Review:

Go no further for the biggest thoughts about the biggest ever pop icon.

despising what Presley became, everyone is now in on--not the joke, but the remaking of their world.

Marcus's rapt attention to what Elvis continues to mean is both transmitted and justified in a splendid piece of critical art ... a marvelous and profane book about a cultural symbol of cultural symbol-making.--David Foster Wallace "Los Angeles Times Book Review "

Marcus shows that the rupture that was Elvis in 1954-57 lives on, below and above ground, glowing in grotesque and still dangerous half-life.--W.T. Lhamon, Jr. "American Quarterly "

The evidence Marcus has gathered suggests that Presley's posthumous appeal has to do with our ferocious ambivalence toward him, a blend of worship and revulsion, obeisance and revolutionary desire. Sympathetically despising what Presley became, everyone is now in on--not the joke, but the remaking of their world.--Eric Lott "The Nation "

About the Author:

Greil Marcus is the author of Lipstick Traces, The Dustbin of History (both from Harvard) and The Shape of Things to Come, The Old, Weird America, Mystery Train, and other books.

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0385417187
• ISBN 13: 9780385417181
• Binding: Hardcover