Books by Robert McParland

The Rock Music Imagination explores creativity in classic rock, its roots in the blues, and its wide cultural impact. The romantic strains of rock imagination are examined in the songs of popular rock bands, the sixties counterculture, science fiction, the rock music novel, and rock's attention to human rights in the global community.

Literature following the Second World War gave readers characters that asserted the courage and strength of the individual confronting the system. By profiling the protagonists who appear in significant American novels of the 1950s, the historical-cultural context of the 1950s in America is explored in this volume.

The Rock Music Imagination explores creativity in classic rock, its roots in the blues, and its wide cultural impact. The romantic strains of rock imagination are examined in the songs of popular rock bands, the sixties counterculture, science fiction, the rock music novel, and rock's attention to human rights in the global community.

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 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.

Mark Twain has been one of the most popular American writers since 1868. This book shifts the focus of Twain studies from the writer to the reader. This study of Twain's readership and lecture audiences makes use of statistics, literary biography, twentieth-century newspapers, memoirs, diaries, travel journals, letters, literature, interviews, and reading circle reports. The book allows the audience of Mark Twain to speak for themselves in defining their relationship to his work. Twain collected letters from his readers but there are also many other sources of which critics should be aware. The voices of these readers present their views, their likesand sometimes dislikes, their emotional reactions and identification, and their deep attachment and love for Twain's characters, stories, themes, and sensibilities. Bringing together contemporary reactions to Twain and his works and those of later audiences, this book paints a portrait of the American people and of American society and culture. While the book is about Mark Twain, or Samuel Clemens, it presents a larger cultural study of twentieth-century America and the early years of the twentieth century. The book includes Twain's international audience but makes its majorly scholarly contribution in the analysis of Twain's audience in America. It analyzes the people and their values, their reading habits and cultural views, their everyday experiences in the face of the drastic changes of the emerging nation coping with cataclysmic events, such as the Industrial Revolution and the consequences of the Civil War. This book serves as a model for using the audience of a prominent writer to analyze American history, American culture, and the American psyche.This book examines a historical time and an emerging national consciousness that defined the American identity after the Civil War.

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.