Book in Focus
The Intertextuality and Intermediality of the Anglophone Popular Song"/>

14th December 2022

Book in Focus
The Intertextuality and Intermediality of the Anglophone Popular Song

By Michael Ingham


Keywords: Popular song; literary sources; intertextuality; adaptation & appropriation; literary allusion; cultural mobility; reciprocity

The Background of the Book

Although popular song has been the focus of various types of research, the dynamic and creative intertextual and intermedial relationship between literary arts and the popular song has not been widely recognised. Researchers interested in this field may explore a number of related websites that discuss salient examples of the creative encounter between the two and the plethora of dedicated lyrics sites also facilitates this task. Nevertheless, it has lacked visibility by comparison with more dominant adaptation practices, especially for the screen or stage as the dearth of academic studies suggests. Perhaps the preconception that literary texts align more closely with ‘serious music’ has precluded more systematic scholarly investigation, or at least restricted it to pockets of interest among song enthusiasts. The present book is designed to fill this lacuna, and to provide an informative overview and analysis of this significant cultural phenomenon. Relatively little has been published to date on the relationship between literary and other artistic forms (including popular song), and even less in book-length form. Overall, the study provides a valuable resource by exploring the deep intertextual significance of literary source material for the intellectual and emotional diversity that can be found in the popular song form. It is inspired by my own widely shared love of popular music that features inventive, stimulating lyrics or simply memorable and singable ones. My aim is to expand this field of international interest and generate further research and discussion in the process.

A Condensed Introduction

In the book, I trace the often-underappreciated inspiration that the English popular song tradition has taken from various kinds of literature, in addition to touching on the influence of other forms of cultural expression such as pictorial art. In theory, any art medium could interact with song or provide the source for a song adaptation. But, in practice, only a few other art forms are catalysts for the process of inter-semiotic transformation that song-writing constitutes. The most common and, historically speaking, closely associated of these is poetry, which furnishes a considerable proportion of my case studies. Originally, poetry and song were more or less indistinguishable in many cultural traditions, but after the Middle Ages they became much more distinct: the sung form was generally considered culturally ‘lowbrow’ and the written or spoken form ‘highbrow’. Despite this division, later poets continued to use the generic description of ‘song’ in their titles. Consider, for example, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience or Whitman’s Song of Myself, which both emphasise the enduring relationship between the song and poetry. Poets including Homer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Blake, Burns, Poe, Dickinson, Yeats and Lorca have provided stimulus to the popular songwriting imagination and, in the case of a significant number of settings, even partial or complete source texts for songs. The Harlem Renaissance saw a tight relationship between new jazz and blues songs and poetry on the black cultural scene. These literary references are shown to continue in the Tin Pan Alley period, experiencing a boom in the singer-songwriter’s popularity between the early 1960s and early 1980s, both in the U.S. and the U.K. The Beatles reflected the contemporary taste for consuming popular paperback literature with their caustic lyrics in the hit ‘Paperback Writer’, but there were also many song composers in this period who were inspired by literary influences of greater substance. The predilection of lyricists for older poetic source texts is explained by the fact that more recent poetic source material is subject to copyright. At the same time, eloquent and poignant poetry can provide the touchstone for creative independence from the source text, generating a definitive artistic response to source material via the process of transformation.

While poems share a common background with songs, some of the more textually sophisticated examples of the popular song repertoire were inspired by novel extracts or novel titles. Notable examples include classic fictions such as Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Alice in Wonderland, Huckleberry Finn, Ulysses, The Wizard of Oz, Lolita, 1984, Lord of the Rings, and the Gormenghast trilogy. Novel references tend to be used more as motifs or cultural allusions in certain songs, given the impossibility of covering the entire narrative. Two major sources of literary inspiration, namely the Bible and Shakespeare, merit full chapters of their own, being so imaginatively fertile that they have they been the sources for genres as diverse as folk ballads, jazz, rock and many more. However, Greek mythology, the I Ching, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead are among other more recondite sources. In my final chapter, I explore the interactions between stage works (both speech dramas and musicals) and popular songs, including the crossover form of plays with songs. A notable recent example has been Conor McPherson’s hit play, Girl From the North Country, which is consciously structured by songs from Bob Dylan’s back catalogue.

My Research Methodology

My research methodology involved trawling through my own memories and knowledge of music, as well as those of close friends and family members, to find as many examples as possible of the intertextual and intermedial relationship between English popular songs and literary texts of all kinds. Although the songs chosen for the study had to be English language texts, the sources alluded to or adapted from could be of any cultural-linguistic origin. The other major research sources were websites such as SongMeanings.com, Literary Hub (lithub.com), Far Out Magazine (https://faroutmagazine.co.uk), bookriot.com, lyrics.com, Wikipedia and various others. Listening to songs and comparing lyrics with poems and fiction passages in a critical and analytical close-reading process was also a key research tool. Ultimately, the study is intended to be comprehensive but also subjective by necessity, inviting the reader to agree or disagree and to consider alternative interpretations of songs, or for that matter alternative songs). If this study generates further work on literary intertextuality in popular song, such developments can only be beneficial to a wider appreciation of the field.

A Summary of the Key Findings

My study argues that songwriting and original lyrics can be regarded as an extension of a broad literary-cultural continuum. This perspective runs contrary to the more traditional critical tendency to dismiss it as a lowbrow manifestation of popular culture. Based on cultural theory paradigms related to remediation, and supported by selected exemplary case studies, my book analyses and discusses the reciprocal process of ‘lending’ and ‘borrowing’ in popular song lyrics and cultural production. The fusion of two distinct consciousnesses (the source writer’s and the lyricist’s) in the production of a hybrid text, together with added layers of musical instrumentation, makes it impossible to arrive at any incontrovertible truth about a single unified meaning, even if the song theme is indisputable. The listener’s own consciousness triangulates this relationship, facilitating other possible interpretations. Such polyvalence of meaning, however far-fetched it may initially appear, can enrich the song and help us discover fresh connotations on each successive listening, whether we agree or not with the interpretation.

To put it simply, a good song adaptation is one that functions well as a song, not primarily as a skillful adaptation. In adapted or allusive songs by folk-rock-pop composers of the calibre of Bob Dylan, songwriter-poet Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush, the innate musical quality of literary source text lexis and striking visual imagery can be transformed into a concrete and effective musical form through melodic and harmonic settings, as well as the judicious choices of genre, tempo, key, notation, vocal range, and instrumentation. This creative alchemy is bi-directional: the song contributes to the afterlife of the poem, play, novel or film but, at the same time, draws its text or textual allusion from the literary source, remediating and redefining it in an unfamiliar context. In rare cases, such as Dylan’s ten-minute epic ‘Desolation Row’, the literary references engage in a cultural critique that is independent and transformative of the frame of reference of the source text. In such cases, the intertextual relationship with specific titles, authors and characters of often canonical literary works is weighted in favour of the target text’s appropriation.

An In-Depth Focus on a Single Chapter

Chapter Four investigates the complex inter-relationship between anglophone popular music and literary fiction, whether in the form of literary concept albums, quotations from fictional texts or references to novel characters, titles, etc. Some of the more textually sophisticated examples from the popular song repertoire were inspired by novel extracts or novel titles. This includes notable classic fiction such as Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Alice in Wonderland, Huckleberry Finn, Ulysses, The Wizard of Oz, Lolita, 1984, Lord of the Rings, and the Gormenghast trilogy. That said, references to novels tend to be used more as motifs or cultural allusions in certain songs, given the impossibility of covering the entire narrative. There is a strong storytelling strain in many well-known pop songs that reflects inspiration from both literary and commercial fiction sources, as the Elvis Costello song, ‘Everyday I Write the Book’, quoted in my chapter title, implies. We might also compare the correspondence between novels and short stories to the relationship between concept albums and individual songs.

Many songs and pieces of short fiction are conceived as freestanding, self-contained works, even if they are anthologised in the context of an album or a short story collection. Some story collections such as James Joyce’s Dubliners would be analogous to a loose concept album, such as Pink Floyd’s classic Dark Side of the Moon, while a sequential narrative concept album such as The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis arguably has something in common with the narrative structure of a novel. From a similar perspective, individual songs that recount a compressed narrative, such as Johnny Cash’s whimsical ballad ‘A Boy Named Sue’ may be seen as conceptually akin to the short story form. My chapter discusses a wide range of literary songs and concept albums, concluding that many literary references and allusions are more skillfully embedded or adapted by song composers than previous generations of critics have acknowledged.


Dr Michael Ingham is Adjunct Professor of Literature, Film and Drama in the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His publications related to song adaptations include “The Stretched Metre of an Antique Song: Jazzin’ the Food of Love” in Shakespeare Studies (2016); “Popular Song and Adaptation”, in The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies (2017); “Ordinary Man: Christy Moore and the Irish Contemporary Ballad” in Music and Politics (2017); and “‘Moody Food of Us that Trade in Love’: Remediations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in Popular Music” in Shakespeare’s Global Sonnets (edited by Jane Kingsley-Smith and William Rampone, 2022). He is also the author of the book Stageplay and Screenplay: The Intermediality of Theatre and Cinema (2017), a study of the intertextuality and reciprocity between stage and screen dramas.


The Intertextuality and Intermediality of the Anglophone Popular Song is available now in Hardback at a 25% discount. Enter code PROMO25 at checkout to redeem.

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