Too Late to Be Late Again: David Bowie, the Late 1970s, and Romanticism
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2022
Publication Title
Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature
Abstract
“Too Late to Be Late Again: David Bowie, the Late 1970s, and Romanticism” discusses Bowie’s work against the background of German experimental artists such as Neu!, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, and Manuel Göttsching. Bowie’s European predecessors are themselves examined in the light of German Romanticism, the concept of “Sehnsucht,” and the Bildungsroman tradition, all of which inform Bowie’s own negotiations of artistic identity in this period. As the chapter moves forward from Bowie’s Station to Station through the Berlin albums that ended the 1970s and into 1980’s Scary Monsters, it brings Coleridgean aesthetics and Byronic Romantic irony to bear on this body of work—and vice-versa, showing us via this nexus of Bowie and transcontinental Romanticism how the creative and cultural conditions associated with the postmodern are also operative within, and indeed essential to, what we call the “Romantic.”
Department
English
First Page
117
Last Page
139
DOI
10.1007/978-3-030-97622-4_6
Recommended Citation
Knox, Julian, "Too Late to Be Late Again: David Bowie, the Late 1970s, and Romanticism" (2022). Faculty and Staff Works. 533.
https://kb.gcsu.edu/fac-staff/533