The Last Alchemist What if an aging Nazi scientist hid away on an American farm, pretending that he was dead because he knew too much? This thriller, grounded in historical research, reveals the frightening prospect of "Hitler's children." Jake Kincaid's chance encounter with an elderly scientist, who calls himself an alchemist, introduces him to a diabolical plot. A past associate of the alchemist has reanimated a mad dream of a eugenics program begun with Nazi officers and Scandinavian w...

Cultural Memory, Consciousness, and the Modernist Novel is a study of the novel and consciousness in James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. This volume focuses on novels of the 1920s and engages in a study of Joyce’s epiphany and language play, Yeats’s esoteric philosophy, Lawrence’s vitalism, and Woolf’s stream of consciousness techniques. In this book readers enter the minds of Joyce’s characters Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in the modern city, the es...

Robert McParland explores American music as a bridge between art, audiences, and the environment.American Melodies is a study of America's varied music genres that is grounded in interviews with folk, rock, and jazz musicians, music listeners, songwriters, and organizers of music programs in local communities. The author explores artists' ecological, social, and technological concerns and the ways that music as an art form can reflect upon and actively res...

The music, performances, and cultural impact of some of the most enduring figures in popular music are explored in Rock Music Icons: Musical and Cultural Impacts. This collection investigates authenticity, identity, and the power of the voices and images of widely circulated and shared artists that have become the soundtrack of our lives.

The 1970s saw a wave of singer-songwriters flood the airwaves and concert halls across the United States. This book organizes the stories of approximately 150 artists whose songs created the soundtrack to people's lives during the decade that forever shaped musical composition. Some well-known, others less known, these artists were the song-poets and storytellers who wrote their own music and lyrics.Featuring biographical information and discography overviews for each artist, this ...

Critical Essays on English and Bengali Detective Fiction brings together three strains of detective fiction: British, American, and Bengal. The import of detective fiction from Britain has influenced generations of writers of Bengali detective fiction. In this anthology of critical essays by scholars on detective fiction, we have divided the contents into three groups. First, there are essays on classic British detective fiction, with essays on Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan...

Novels bring us into fictional worlds where we encounter the lives, struggles, and dreams of characters who speak to the underlying pulse of society and social change. In this book, post–World War II America comes alive again as literary critic Robert McParland tilts the rearview mirror to see the characters that captured the imaginations of millions of readers in the most popular and influential novels of the 1950s. This literary era introduced us to Holden Caulfield, Augie March, Lolita,...

Myth pervades heavy metal. With visual elements drawn from medieval and horror cinema, the genre's themes of chaos, dissidence and alienation transmit an image of Promethean rebellion against the conventional. In dialogue with the modern world, heavy metal draws imaginatively on myth and folklore to construct an aesthetic and worldview embraced by a vast global audience. The author explores the music of Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Metallica and many others from a mythological...

The Rock Music Imagination is an exploration of rock artists in their social and artistic contexts, particularly between 1964 and 1980, and of rock music in relation to literature, that is, creative expression, fantastic imagination, and contemporary fiction about rock. Robert McParland analyzes how rock music touches our imaginative lives by looking at themes that appear in classic rock music: freedom and liberation, utopia and dystopia, community, rebellion, the outsider, the qu...

Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, with their distinct vocal harmonies, blending of rock, jazz, folk, and blues, and political and social activism, have remained one of the most enduring musical acts of the 1960s. This book examines their songs and themes, which continue to resonate with contemporary listeners, and argues that Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young reflect part of the broader story of American culture. This appreciative volume contextualizes their work within the political climate ...

From the rise of the American Evangelical movement to the introduction of Eastern philosophies in the West, the past century has seen major changes in the religious makeup of Western culture. As one result, musicians across the world have brought both "new" and old religious beliefs into their works.This book investigates rock music as an expression of religious inquiry and religious devotion. Contributors to this essay collection use a variety of sources, including artist biograph...

The Who were one of the most memorable and influential of the 1960s British Invasion bands—memorable because of their loudness and because they destroyed instruments during performances, and influential because of their success in crafting “Power Pop” singles like “My Generation” and “I Can See for Miles,” long-playing albums Live at Leeds and Who’s Next, and the “rock operas” Tommy and Quadrophenia. The themes that principal songwriter Pete Townshend imparted into The Who’s music drew upo...