A career-spanning account of the artistry and politics of Bob Dylan's
songwriting
Bob Dylan's reception of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature has
elevated him beyond the world of popular music, establishing him as a
major modern artist. However, until now, no study of his career has
focused on the details and nuances of the songs, showing how they work
as artistic statements designed to create meaning and elicit emotion.
Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work (originally published as Bob Dylan's
Poetics) is the first comprehensive book on both the poetics and
politics of Dylan's compositions. It studies Dylan, not as a pop hero,
but as an artist, as a maker of songs. Focusing on the interplay of
music and lyric, it traces Dylan's innovative use of musical form, his
complex manipulation of poetic diction, and his dialogues with other
artists, from Woody Guthrie to Arthur Rimbaud. Moving from Dylan's
earliest experiments with the blues, through his mastery of rock and
country, up to his densely allusive recent recordings, Timothy Hampton
offers a detailed account of Dylan's achievement. Locating Dylan in the
long history of artistic modernism, the book studies the relationship
between form, genre, and the political and social themes that crisscross
Dylan's work. Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work offers both a nuanced
engagement with the work of a major artist and a meditation on the
contribution of song at times of political and social change.
