Karen Fournier – författare

Through an examination of her music, videos, philanthropic work, and biographical details, this book gives insight into Alanis Morissette's musical career and day-to-day life, from her early pop beginnings in Canada to her work today.As a whole, Alanis Morissette's work has never been critically analyzed. The Words and Music of Alanis Morissette addresses this oversight through its examination of Morissette's work in the context of biographical facts, its relationship to other cultural trends, and its reflection of the female perspective.This book merges biographical information with a critical examination of the music that she produced and performed during all periods of her life, thereby providing a needed overview of Morissette's body of work. All Morissette fans will appreciate learning about the details of her life, but the author's melding of the star's personal life story with an informed analysis of popular music will also appeal to a wider audience—readers interested in music, culture, women's studies, or female musicians, for example. The book provides entertaining and engrossing reading for any Alanis Morissette fan and serves as a resource that documents her broad contributions to the music industry.

A discussion of the 1970s British punk scene, this book foregrounds the participation of women as performers and songwriters in early British punk, and examines how women in the scene crafted expressions of social alienation that were informed by the intersection of classism and sexism.Early British punk rock is often associated with male bands like the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Damned, the Buzzcocks, or The Stranglers, whose songs capture and reflect a historical moment in Britain that was defined by unemployment, nationwide strikes, racial strife, and the growing sense of hopelessness within a seemingly deteriorating British Empire. While lesser-known, the work of female punk bands like Penetration, The Raincoats, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Slits, and X-Ray Spex also engaged with these themes, but added a gendered perspective on what it meant to be “an underdog” in Britain in the 1970s. Through a close reading of punk art, fashion, and music, this book examines how female contributors to the early British scene responded uniquely to the alienation expressed by their male peers, and demonstrates how social alienation was inflected by the intersection of classism and sexism in the work of those women who helped to shape the early British scene.