Triptych: Three Studies of Manic Street Preachers' The Holy Bible

Description

Manic Street Preachers were and remain one of the most interesting, significant, and best-loved bands of the past thirty years. Their third album The Holy Bible (1994) is generally acknowledged to be their most enduring and fascinating work, and one of the most compelling and challenging records of the nineties. Triptych reconsiders The Holy Bible from three separate, intersecting angles, combining the personal with the political, history with memory, and popular accessibility with intellectual attention to the album's depth and complexity. Rhian E. Jones considers The Holy Bible in terms of its political context, setting it within the de-industrialised Welsh landscape of the 1990s; Daniel Lukes looks at the album's literary and artistic sources; and Larissa Wodtke analyses the way the album's links with philosophical ideas of memory and the archive.

Larissa Wodtkeis the Research Coordinator at the Centre for Research in Young People's Texts and Cultures at the University of Winnipeg, in Canada, and the Managing Editor of the academic journal Jeunesse- Young People, Texts, Cultures. Rhian E. Jonesgrew up in South Wales and now lives in London, where she writes on history, politics, popular culture and the places where they intersect. She wrote the literary parody 'PG Wodehouse's American Psycho' for McSweeney's Internet Tendency and has written for various other publications including The Guardian, The Quietus, Salon, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Morning Star, and New Welsh Review. Daniel Lukeshas a PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University. He currently teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington.