Clowns in the Burying Ground

"In Clowns in the Burying Ground, Christopher K. Coffman presents an intertextual reading of the Grateful Dead and their lyrics. Coffman argues that the band's lyricists were deeply and significantly engaged with literary modernism. Through analysis of their music, lyrics, and biographies, Coffman shows how the band, as a group and as individuals, drew on the English and European literary canon to shape both the form and content of their creative work. Individual chapters focus on how a particular set of literary texts influenced the band at key points in their career. For instance, Coffman traces the biographical and literary connections and exchanges between the band and the Beat Generation and employs Mary Shelley's romantic gothic novel Frankenstein to analyze the split consciousness of the song "Dire Wolf". Coffman draws on the language of the "literary fragment", conceived by German Romantic philosophers and their intellectual heirs, to identify how the Grateful Dead's lyricists employed intertextuality, allusion, and fused aesthetic fragments to explore the tensions and spaces between permanency and ephemerality. Clowns in the Burying Ground considers the implications of the literary fragment as theory for the Grateful Dead at certain points in their career and in relation to those literary figures to whose works they most often turned: Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Mary Shelley, Robert Burns, Arthur Rimbaud, Rainer Maria Rilke, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan."--