The rising interest in the possibility that literature and popular music can intersect and, in a multitude of ways, is generally accompanied by the point that, when such circumstances arise, we are essentially witnessing an example of a field of high artistic expression convening with a terrain more connected with mass production and consumption, a clash of the aesthetically oriented with the commercially inclined, perhaps. Nonetheless, in these postmodern times there is an increasing acceptance that the artificial boundaries between an elite activity – fiction, verse, drama – and the so-called low practices of the popular song can be just that: the long-standing, and once naturally assumed, cultural construction separating those areas has now almost faded away.

In Litpop: Writing and Popular Music, the promiscuous interaction of words on the page – the novel, the poem, the journalistic review, even the academic article – with the creative practices of music-making – the tune, the lyrics, the performance – is considered from a variety of angles and this volume provides a rich and engaging entrée to this relatively new area of scholarly consideration, marking out the patch, explaining its significance and, most usefully, up-profiling the various post-millennial titles and journal chapters that have been getting to grips with the overlap of these different, but potentially highly complementary, practices. The Introduction alone sets up the argument at some length but with admirable clarity and justifies this intertextual reading of musico-literary collusions and collisions with assurance.

Helpfully, the co-editors’ extended opening reveals a quite well established history of academics attempting to make sense of the connection between the literary and the musical – Western art music scholars have been pursuing this interface for some time – and the extended footnoted entries (sometimes rather deeper than the main text on the page) give you a real sense that, if the connection between serious writing and serious music has been excavated quite often over a number of decades, there is now a fresh canon evolving to support the more recent associations of literature, in its many forms, and popular music, in its many incarnations.

We may think of potent examples of this crossover – from Dylan's engagement with poet Ginsberg to Colin MacInnes' vivid portrayal of post-skiffle Soho, the spoken word of Gil Scott-Heron and verse of Patti Smith to Bowie's cut-up techniques borrowed from Burroughs, not to mention a cascade of club culture writing by Irvine Welsh and others – yet you will find little reference here to these individuals and those topics and, in all sorts of ways, that makes LitPop all the more appealing. The catholic style in which this subject is unpicked and unpacked confirms how many new avenues are opening up to add to the existing networks of enquiry.

The expedition is still quite exhilaratingly fresh and the aforementioned high–low tensions that form the backdrop to the debate add more than a frisson of intellectual pleasure to the process. As they present their initial arguments, Carroll and Hansen invoke a range of names, from Laurence Kramer to Tia DeNora, David Byrne to Simon Frith, Nicholas Cook to Hanif Kureishi, to cast light on key issues of cultural value. They then summarise: ‘This collection is concerned with a broad spectrum of writing including literary and popular fiction, poetry and lyrics, and rock and pop journalism and extending to the creative and industrial uses of the graphic arts. The “lit” of the title is not intended to limit discussion to the “literary” arts as conventionally defined but does serve to flag an interest in the uses to which the “literary” is put in popular music cultures' (p. 19). After that the 14 contributors showcase how these two disciplinary titans manoeuvre and mate to produce an intoxicating set of hybrids, across time zones and traversing geographies, spanning technologies and contemplating strains of class, ethnicity and gender.

David Ibotson takes us furthest back in time, focusing on Jerome K. Jerome's jauntily comic novel Three Men in a Boat (1889) and subsequently revealing how the place of music hall in this particular picaresque romp frames metaphors that go well beyond the pleasant evocations of the popular tune. For the late 19th-century lower middle-class man, the risqué and bawdy presentations of London's cabarets hide a seething nest of insecurities about status and sex and the place of Britain as a colonial power. Says the author: ‘Literary criticism has tended to overlook [the book], regarding it as a minor, insubstantial literary footnote. However, such a simplistic view of Jerome's work ignores the use of the Thames and music hall as parodic spaces in which the tenets of empire can be interrogated’ (p. 45).

In sharp contrast, and the whole century later, the riot grrrls are gathering in centres like Olympia, Washington and Washington, DC, and Julia Downes in her chapter considers how the written word – diaries, letters, fanzines – forms a vital, and revealing, layer to the ideological counter-revolution against the patriarchy that figures like Kathleen Hanna and her band Bikini Kill willed into life in the final decade of the 20th century. The use of music was central to these women, but Downes takes the view that riot grrrl is more than just a sub-genre of rock. ‘It is more useful’, she says, ‘to make sense of riot grrl as a fluid set of contested, sonic, spatial and linguistic practices with the aim to incite a radical girl gang into being’ (p. 92) and ‘writing techniques’ (p. 92) were a crucial component of the wider strategy.

And there is so much more between these covers: Fela Kuti read through the lens of Bakhtin; Gang of Four and Scriit Politti dissected via Gramsci; the maturing voice of rock journalism in the quality press of the 1980s identified and set against the emergence of a new ‘imaginative historicism’ shaped by Morley, Reynolds and others at a similar time; the critical place of music in the novels Vernon God Little and Morvern Callar; and the importance of words on record labels and in sleeve notes, capped by the ever-lively voice of the much missed Sheila Whiteley, in her crisp and concise coda. Litpop adopts a broad definition of literature, but that very eclecticism will help to open more doors, unbolt more windows, as the fertile interplay of writing and popular music becomes, I am sure, a subject of increasing consideration.