The similarities between the chanson française and the canzone d'autore have been often noted but never fully explored. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, encompassing textual analysis of song lyrics, cultural history and popular music studies, Rachel Haworth considers the different ways in which French and Italian song is thought about, written
"The book offers an overview of the rhetoric and ideological rules governing canzone d’autore and chanson, of their rarely investigated connections, and of their shifting but persisting popularity today, thus signalling a growing anglophone interest in French popular music and a new emerging attention to Italian canzone."
- Vincenzo Perna in VOLUME!
Rachel Haworth is Lecturer in Italian at the University of Hull. She has published work on various aspects of French and Italian popular music from the 1950s and 1960s. Her research explores questions of gender, performance, stardom, legitimation, and value in post-war Italian and French popular music.