Barbara Ching

Pamela Fox

Old Roots, New Routes takes an in-depth look at the many influences, meanings, and identities of this contemporary music form. Because the definition of the term alt.country changes continually, even the genre's own mouthpiece, the Web site nodepression.com, declared its terrain to be "alternative country (whatever that is)." Despite alt.country's murky parameters, its origins, indeed, its patron saints, are generally acknowledged to range from the Carter Family and Hank Williams---as interpreters of traditional American country---to the country-rock fusions of Gram Parsons and Steve Earle. Just as other musical genres before it have distanced themselves from the popular and commercial center, from the start alt.country has positioned itself as a different kind of music than the slick country sounds emanating from Nashville hit machines such as Garth Brooks and Shania Twain. And yet alt.country's embrace of authenticity and disdain for commercialism---while simultaneously injecting into a traditional, working-class music form an often cosmopolitan flavor and "Generation X" values---has resulted in a fascinating hybrid full of contradictions. In Old Roots, New Routes, Pamela Fox and Barbara Ching bring together a range of scholars to investigate as never before this significant contemporary music form, providing in addition new ways to approach the worlds of country and alternative music more generally. Individual essays explore the work of a variety of artists, including Neko Case, Jay Farrar, Justin Treviño, and alt.country "hero" Gram Parsons, along with promotional rhetoric, album art, advertising, and fan Web sites, to offer readers a comprehensive understanding of how alt.country functions as a distinct musical form. Pamela Fox is Associate Professor of English and currently the Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University. She is the author of Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890–1945. Barbara Ching is Associate Professor at the University of Memphis. Her previous books include Wrong's What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture and Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy, coedited with Gerald Creed.

The Cultural Politics of Alt.Country Music

Old Roots, New Routes

Many recent discussions of working-class culture in literary and cultural studies have tended to present an oversimplified view of resistance. In this groundbreaking work, Pamela Fox offers a far more complex theory of working-class identity, particularly as reflected in British novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the concept of class shame, she produces a model of working-class subjectivity that understands resistance in a more accurate and useful way—as a complicated kind of refusal, directed at both dominated and dominant culture. With a focus on certain classics in the working-class literary "canon," such as The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and Love on the Dole, as well as lesser-known texts by working-class women, Fox uncovers the anxieties that underlie representations of class and consciousness. Shame repeatedly emerges as a powerful counterforce in these works, continually unsettling the surface narrative of protest to reveal an ambivalent relation toward the working-class identities the novels apparently champion. Class Fictions offers an equally rigorous analysis of cultural studies itself, which has historically sought to defend and value the radical difference of working-class culture. Fox also brings to her analysis a strong feminist perspective that devotes considerable attention to the often overlooked role of gender in working-class fiction. She demonstrates that working-class novels not only expose master narratives of middle-class culture that must be resisted, but that they also reveal to us a need to create counter narratives or formulas of working-class life. In doing so, this book provides a more subtle sense of the role of resistance in working class culture. While of interest to scholars of Victorian and working-class fiction, Pamela Fox’s argument has far-reaching implications for the way literary and cultural studies will be defined and practiced.

Pamela Fox

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