Bücher von Robert McParland

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 organises the stories of approximately 150 artists whose songs created the soundtrack to people's lives during the decade that forever shaped musical composition.

This book examines the 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 book looks at the bestselling titles since the early 20th century. The author considers how the popular circulation of these books reflected America's consciousness and tastes at different junctures in the country's history.

This is the first book to bring together the imagination and energy of rock music with its sources in mythology and science fiction. The mythological roots of classic rock music artists from David Bowie, the Jefferson Airplane, and Pink Floyd, to Rush, Blue Oyster Cult, and Iron Maiden are explored, along with the stories they tell and the critiques of contemporary society that their songs carry.

This book looks at authors and their works during one of the most tumultuous decades of the twentieth century, focusing on works that resonated with readers. A sweeping social, literary, and cultural history, this book explores the courage and hopes of the "greatest generation" through its imaginative literature.

Demonstrating the power a single author can have on generations of individuals around the world, Citizen Steinbeck enables readers to make sense of both the past and the present through the prism of this literary icon's inspirational work.

From 1837 to 1912, Charles Dickens was by far the most popular writer for American readers. Through several sources including statistics, literary biography, newspapers, memoirs, diaries, letters, and interviews, Robert McParland examines a historical time and an emerging national consciousness that defined the American identity before and after the Civil War. American voices present their views, tastes, emotional reactions and identifications, and deep attachment and love for Dickens's characters, stories, themes, and sensibilities as well as for the man himself. Bringing together contemporary reactions to Dickens and his works, this book paints a portrait of the American people and of American society and culture from 1837 to the turn of the twentieth century. It is in this view of nineteenth-century America_its people and their values, their reading habits and cultural views, the scenarios of their everyday lives even in the face of the drastic changes of the emerging nation_that Charles Dickens's American Audience makes its greatest impact.