A01=Christopher K. Coffman
Alfred
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Author_Christopher K. Coffman
Beat Literature
Bob Dylan
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David Foster Wallace
Douglas Coupland
Duino Elegies
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Finnegans Wake
French literature
German philosophy
German Romanticism
gonzo journalism
Gothic literature
Grateful Dead
Hamlet
Hunter S. Thompson
James Joyce
James Merrill
Jean-Luc Nancy
Joan Didion
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
King Lear
literary fragment
literary theory
Lord Tennyson
Mary Shelley
Modernism
Mountain on the Moon
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Ovid
Philip K. Dick
Polaroids from the Dead
popular music
postmodernism
Rainer Maria Rilke
Richard Brautigan
Robert Burns
Robert Hunter
Romantic philosophers
Symbolist poetry
T. S. Eliot
Walt Whitman
William Carlos Williams
William Shakespeare
Product details
- ISBN 9781478033202
- Weight: 354g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 10 Feb 2026
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In Clowns in the Burying Ground, Christopher K. Coffman presents intertextual readings of the Grateful Dead and their lyrics to argue that the band’s lyricists were deeply and significantly engaged with the literary tradition. Through an analysis of their music, lyrics, and biographies, Coffman shows how the group and its individual members drew on the canons of European and American literature to shape both the form and content of their creative work. Coffman draws on the language of the “literary fragment,” as conceived by German Romantic philosophers and their intellectual heirs, to identify how the Grateful Dead’s lyricists employed intertextuality, allusion, and other strategies to explore how meaning takes shape at the boundary between poetry and philosophy. From Shakespeare to “Shakedown Street,” Clowns in the Burying Ground demonstrates the Dead’s literary depth and how their most successful lyrics and performances walk the line between creation and chaos.
Christopher K. Coffman is Master Lecturer of Humanities at Boston University. He is the author of Rewriting Early America: The Prenational Past in Postmodern Literature and an editor of After Postmodernism: The New American Fiction and William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion.
