This Handbook illustrates the many ways that progressive rock and metal music forge striking engagements with literary texts and themes.

The authors and their objects of analytic inquiry offer global and diverse perspectives on these genres and their literary connections: from ancient times to the modern world, from children’s literature to epic poetry, from mythology to science fiction, and from esoteric fantasy to harsh political criticism. The musical treatments of these literary materials span the continents from South and North America through Europe and Asia. The collection presents critical perspectives on the enduring and complex relationships between words and music as these are expressed in progressive rock and metal.

The book is aimed primarily at an academic market, valuable for second- through final-year students on undergraduate courses devoted to both popular music and to literary studies, and to postgraduate programs and researchers in a range of fields, including popular music studies, musicology, creative music performance and composition, songwriting, literary studies, narrative studies, folklore studies, science fiction studies, cultural studies, liberal studies, and sociology, and for media and history courses that have an interest in the intersection of narratives, music, and society.

Chris Anderton is Associate Professor in Cultural Economy at Southampton Solent University, Southampton, U.K. He has written/edited five books and published numerous chapters and journal articles on music business, music festivals, music fandom, music genre, media narratives of music, and progressive rock. He guest-edited a special edition of Rock Music Studies that focused on progressive rock (2019), and is currently co-editing The Intellect Handbook of Global Music Industries. He is also the editor of The Anthem Impact in Music Business, Technology and Culture book series.

Lori Burns is Professor of Music at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her interdisciplinary research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, merges musical analysis and cultural theory to explore representations of gender and sexuality in the lyrical, musical, and visual texts of popular music. She has published articles in edited collections and leading journals. Her 2002 monograph, Disruptive Divas: Feminism, Identity, and Popular Music, won the Pauline Alderman Award in 2005. She is co-editor of The Pop Palimpsest with Serge Lacasse (2018), The Bloomsbury Handbook to Popular Music Video Analysis with Stan Hawkins (2019), and Analyzing Recorded Music with William Moylan and Mike Alleyne (2022). Two additional edited collections are forthcoming: The Routledge Handbook of Metal Music Composition with Ciro Scotto and The Routledge Handbook to the Popular Music Cover Song with Mike Alleyne.