The editor of Rock and Romanticism is soliciting essays about the ways in which rock music, broadly defined, expands, interprets, restates, and conflicts with Romanticism, broadly defined. "Rock music" as a category will be extended to include all popular music since the 1950s, including but not limited to rock, varieties of metal, R&B, soul, varieties of punk, folk, techno, progressive rock, indie, new wave, alternative, psychedelic, gothic, funk, country, and blues. If the music has been written or performed since the 1950s and you're wondering if it fits, the answer is "yes." For the purposes of this study, "Romanticism" will also be broadly defined, considering trans-European, trans-Atlantic, and global Romanticisms as well as Romanticism in literature, art, and music.

Papers might consider women in rock and women in Romanticism; lyric poetry and song lyrics or song lyrics as lyric poetry; readings of rock and Romanticism that compare conditions between Europe during the Napoleonic wars and musical trends in the post-McCarthy era and/or post 9-11 United States, or 1960s or later England or continental Europe; the gothic in literature and in music; opera and the rock opera; drug use, drug literature, and drug music of the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries; the pastoral in Romantic literature and in rock music; adaptations, interpretations, and performances of Romantic-era texts by twentieth-century and later musicians; the figure of Satan in Romanticism and in rock; protest literature and protest music; sexual identity in Romanticism and rock, etc.

Ideal papers will theorize or historicize their subjects in a way that places rock music in a coherent dialog with Romantic-era art, literature, or music, contributing to a consideration of the boundaries or definition(s) of "Romanticism" as an artistic mode while also considering the implications of chronological, national, social, sexual, and/or economic difference.

Please email a 250-500 word proposal that includes your name, title, institutional affiliation (if applicable), mailing address, email address, and a brief, updated CV to jamesrovira@gmail.com by August 1st, 2015. Completed papers, which should be within the 5000-7000 word range, are expected by November 15, 2015.