Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture

Patricia R. Schroeder is a professor of English at Ursinus College, the author of The Feminist Possibilities of Dramatic Realism and The Presence of the Past in Modern American Drama.

• Introduction: Mythologies of Robert Johnson; Robert Johnson as contested space; The invention of the past; The paradox of authenticity; The new cultural politics difference; Virtual Robert Johnson; Conclusion: Robert Johnson, a strange attractor

Certificate of Merit for Best Research in Recorded Blues by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), 2005."Patricia Schroeder's book is intellectually generous and morally acute. She is sensitive both to what is lost when Robert Johnson is disappeared from history into myth, and what is gained when both the man and his work become the common property--the imaginative free field--of all those, like Schroeder herself, who could never have encountered Johnson or his songs in their own place and time."--Greil Marcus "Patricia Schroeder's masterful study of Robert Johnson touches the virtual and the historical, from websites to short stories, documentary films to recent legends. Venturing well beyond the bluesman's Mississippi home and the records he made in the late 1930s, she shows how our modern world has embraced him as a complex and emblematic figure."--Stephen Wade