The Crossroads of Music and Literature: New Essays on the Muse of Song brings together fourteen original essays from an international, intergenerational cohort of scholars, each taking a fresh approach to the manner in which music plays a crucial role in literary texts and to the ways in which music is itself a work of literature.

The relationship of song lyrics to lyric poetry is taken up in work on artists as diverse as Bob Dylan, Motörhead, Nas, and Townes Van Zandt, while the centrality of music and sound in the midst of prose is probed in novels by Ralph Ellison, Valeria Luiselli, and Ann Petry. The creation of artistic communities is considered through the cathartic lens of Sad Girl Music, the anti-Fascist dissonance of punk, and Chicanx translations of British pop, alongside explorations of turntablist poetics, Black voice versus blank verse, the narratology of popular song, and more.