Fire, Poison, and Black Tears

This dissertation is a study of metaphors of emotion in rebétiko song texts. Rebétiko is a major popular-music style of modern Greece, consisting of melancholic songs full of sorrow, disappointment, and misfortune, as well as passion and romance, but also of cheerful songs of revelry and a carefree attitude to life. The genre developed in the Greek-speaking world and its diaspora in the early twentieth century. Its roots can be traced to mainland Greece, Asia Minor, and the Greek islands, but th