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Sillages critiques is an academic peer-reviewed journal devoted to the arts and literatures of anglophone cultures. It is the e-journal of  VALE : Voix Anglophones, Littérature et Esthétique (E.D. IV, Faculté des Lettres, Sorbonne Université). The journal, which is listed in the DOAJ, publishes cutting-edge articles on topics and research issues explored by the VALE Research Centre, but also invites proposals for thematic issues and submissions for its varia section.

Latest issue
39 | 2025
Rocking Romanticism | Off to bed!

Numéro double / Double issue
Le romantisme en rock | Au lit !
Rocking Romanticism | Off to bed!
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Credits: Chris Walter / WireImage / via Getty Images

The present issue is based, for the most part, on papers given at the International RomRock Conference, “Rocking Romanticism,” held at the Université d’Artois in March 2024 under the coordination of Adrian Grafe and Marc Porée. While the study of rock has now long been established in academia – notably from the kind of sociological perspective pioneered by Stuart Hall (1964) and developed by Simon Frith (1978) among others – , and while various attempts have been made to link rock ‘poetry’ to the literary tradition, the special relation between rock music and Romanticism has only more recently begun to attract sustained critical attention. Especially important in that respect has been the work of James Rovira and his collaborators, whose three edited books (respectively on the relevance of Romantic poets to classic rock musicians, on postpunk and metal as “dark romanticisms,” and on women performers) logically feature among the most frequent references in the articles assembled here. Yet, as these will demonstrate, this field of inquiry is sufficiently ample to warrant a wealth of further investigations.

“Romanticism” is admittedly an elusive notion; so, in fact, is “rock.” What they might appear to have in common, beyond a socially significant catalogue of small-r romantic clichés or any number of actual verbal/textual echoes, is a fruitful tension between the yearning for primordial freedom on the one hand, and the aspiration towards cultural development or even refoundation on the other. Ranging from the familiarity of Beat poets and early rock luminaries with Blake biographies to Iron Maiden’s epic heavy metal adaptation of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” from the American Romantic drama that subliminally echoed and repeated itself in the Woodstock festival and its aftermath to the post-Romantic, post-rock iterations of lyrical sublimity in the contemporary-classical work of Caroline Shaw, this special issue of Sillages critiques illustrates the extent and variety of the connections between two eras marked by political effervescence and cultural upheaval. More clearly and lastingly than any other literary or cultural phenomenon perhaps, Romanticism anticipated the definition of rock once given by Jean-Luc Nancy: “a call, truly, to refashion a world” (“un appel, véritablement, à refaire un monde”).

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