Call For Proposals
The Upstart Crows: The Beatles and the British Literary Tradition
(Edited Volume)

Deadline for Submissions:
November 1, 2026

Contact email:
tpace@jcu.edu 

Call for Chapters
Over the years, scholars have explored the parallels between the Beatles and traditional British literary output, drawing connections between their music, literary antecedents, and formal criticism (see Connolly, 2017; Collins, 2020; and Bretzius, 1997). However, this will be the first study to collect in a single volume the relationship between the Beatles and the broad literary tradition they inhabit. Timed to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ White Album, this collection shows how their work extends a long history of challenging, subverting, and integrating British literary traditions.

This project suggests that the cultural shifts of the 1960s represent one of many recurring “ruptures” in British literature, moments where provincial culture and the common vernacular re-invigorate or re-invent the national narrative. I seek proposals that bridge the gap between academic literary criticism and the public humanities, making these connections accessible to a wide audience. While I welcome rigorous scholarly analysis, I am particularly interested in public humanities approaches: chapters that maintain academic depth while remaining accessible to a non-specialist audience. I encourage contributors to utilize a narrative or critical style that bridges the gap between formal literary theory and the lived experience of the Beatles.

I invite 250–300 word proposals for 3,000–6,000 word chapters (including bibliography) that document and critically engage with, among other topics, how the Beatles parallel earlier examples of provincial authors disrupting the established tradition, how character studies in Beatles songs hearken back to previous literary development, or how Beatles albums parallel themes and structures of earlier British novels, plays, or poems. Potential contributors may explore the following parallels, though submissions are not restricted to these:

• The Vernacular Revolution: Comparisons between Chaucer’s Middle English and the Beatles’ use of their Scouse accent as a vehicle for high art

• The Provincial Invasion: The early Beatles and the young William Shakespeare as “Upstart Crows” arriving from the provinces to invigorate the London stage and pop music respectively.

• The Romantic Manifesto: The Beatles and the Wordsworthian focus on the language used by everyday people and the democratization of art.

• Victorian Nonsense and Subversion: The nonsense verse of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear as a precursor to the Beatles’ psychedelic wordplay and their use of nonsense to subvert the rigid social hierarchies of the establishment.

• The Picaresque Journey:A Hard Day’s Night as a modern Fielding or Smollett novel: the “Rake’s Progress” of four provincial lads in the metropolis.

• The Dramatic Monologue: Comparing character-driven songs like "Eleanor Rigby" to Robert Browning’s Victorian monologues and the psychological lyric.

• The Psychedelic Pastoral: Analyzing such songs as “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Penny Lane,” or “Mother Nature’s Son” alongside the landscape and rural traditions of the Georgian poets or WWI poet Edward Thomas.

•  Augustan Satire and Wit: The band’s press-conference wit as a successor to the sharp, social critiques of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift.

• Modernist Multi-Vocality:Sgt. Pepper as a polyphonic text mirroring the modernist “masks” and personas of T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and others, including John Lennon’s wordplay as “Joycean.”

• The Fragmented Text: Exploring The White Album as a successor to the unified discord traditions of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Joyce’s Ulysses, or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, works that use pastiche and multi-vocality to document a culture in flux.

• The Orientalist Gaze: A critical examination of whether the Beatles’ engagement with India represented a genuine literary exchange or a “Pop Orientalism” that reduced Vedic philosophy to a mystical backdrop for Western considerations.

• Hybridity and the “Third Space”: An analysis of George Harrison’s Indian-influenced compositions as “Third Spaces” that challenge colonial binaries by blending Western pop structures with Eastern raga traditions.

• Subverting the Imperial Travelogue: The 1968 Rishikesh pilgrimage viewed as a post-colonial reversal of the traditional British “Journey to India,” where the imperial center seeks spiritual and artistic renewal from the former periphery.

• The “Angry Young Men” and Kitchen Sink Realism: The defiant, anti-Establishment stance of 1950s/60s British realism (Osborne, etc.) mirrored in the Beatles’' early working-class personas and their subversion of “polite” society

Please send a 250-300-word abstract, a short bio, and your recent CV to Tom Pace (tpace@jcu.edu). 

I welcome academic analyses, public humanities, and comparative studies. 

I especially encourage submissions from voices outside traditional patriarchal constraints, including non-binary and non-white perspectives. 

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have further queries.  I look forward to receiving your proposals. 

Dr. Tom Pace is Associate Professor of English at John Carroll University. He directs the university’s first-year writing and writing across the curriculum programs and teaches courses on writing, major British authors, Shakespeare, and the Beatles. His work has appeared in TheJournal of Beatles Studies, Composition Studies, and TheJournal of American Culture. He is currently co-editing The Beatles Across Generations: Collective Memory and the Evolution of Fandom for Bloomsbury Academic Press and has presented research on the Beatles at The Popular Culture Association Conference and the Everything Fab 4 Conference on Rubber Soul.