Premodern Worlds in Heavy Metal Music, volume 2

This book studies how the popular music genre known as heavy metal has become a prolific medium for the reception of premodern and precolonial history, mythology, literature, and visual and performing arts. Hundreds of metal bands around the globe have contributed to a growing catalogue of thousands of songs, including scores of concept albums, that bring the distant past to life through musical styles and instrumentation, song lyrics, album artwork, music videos, photography, stage performance, and merchandise. The chapters in this edited collection aim to not only explain how the premodern past resonates with, and is interpreted by metal artists, but also the sociopolitical dimensions of metal’s reception of the ancient, medieval, and precolonial worlds. Far from an apolitical hobby interest, the past is appropriated as a locus of identity, gender, race, and heritage framed in opposition to the present. Scholars across fields like popular music studies, classical and mideval studies, sociology, and literature apply their disciplines' critical lenses to explore how heavy metal music and culture has taken up premodern histories from around the world. This volume focuses on identities and cultures across the spectrum of heavy metal music, including feminism, masculinity, language, literature, and religion. Topics studied include disability, paganism, Mesoamerican mythology,