Literary critics were not the intended beneficiaries of the New Musicology, the revisionism that supplemented technical analyses of the European classical music canon with broader perspectives drawn from feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies, applied democratically to a range of sounds, including jazz and pop. But these critics eagerly embraced the New Musicology, first baptized in the 1990s, as a license to teach their music department colleagues a thing or two about the theory-friendly interdisciplinary methods common in literary studies since the 1970s. As a result, literature PhDs contributed a number of the most admired and influential New Musicological titles, D. A. Miller’s Place for Us (1998), Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat (1993), and Krin Gabbard’s collections Jazz among the Discourses (1995) and Representing Jazz (1995) among them. By contrast, the three newer titles reviewed here, two by younger literary critics and one by a distinguished historian of print...

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