“I’ve been crawling up so long on your stairway to heaven”: The rise of the female rock memoir

• Authors: Sawczuk, Tomasz

Abstracts

EN

Similarly to rock music, the rock memoir has long been considered a male genre by both the general public and publishers. It might well be claimed that throughout the years there have been many seminal female rock performers, yet only a few of them gained well deserved recognition and engaged the minds of wider audiences. The history of rock had been predominantly a (his)story until 2012 and the publication of Patti Smith’s Just Kids, a female rock memoir which paved the way for many other women thus far silenced by the male-oriented genre. This paper seeks to delve into some of the female rock narratives in order to analyze the ways in which their authors construct their stories and their authorial selves. It also points to those territories of the music industry and the rock memoir which female performers strive to enrich or reclaim by the acts of writing and performing.

Keywords

EN

female rock memoir; feminism; life writing; performance; popular culture

• Publisher: The University of Bialystok
• Journal: Crossroads. A Journal of English Studies
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 15

Dates

published

2016

Contributors

author

Sawczuk, Tomasz

References

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Identifiers

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/11320/6021

DOI

10.15290/cr.2016.15.4.06