Time Out of Mind is one of the most ambitious, complex, and provocative albums of Bob Dylan’s distinguished artistic career. The present book interprets the songs recorded for Time Out of Mind as a series of dreams by a single singer/dreamer. These dreams overlap and intermingle, but three primary levels of meaning emerge. On one level, the singer/dreamer envisions himself as a killer awaiting execution for killing his lover. On another level, the song-cycle functions as religious allegory, dramatizing the protagonist’s relentless struggles with his lover as a battle between spirit and flesh, earth and heaven, salvation and damnation. On still another level, Time Out of Mind is a meditation on American slavery and racism, Dylan’s most personal encounter with the subject, but one tangled up in associations with the minstrelsy tradition and debates surrounding cultural appropriation. Time Out of Mind marks the culmination of several recurring themes that have preoccupied Dylan for decades, and it serves as a pivotal turning point toward his late renaissance in terms of both subject matter and intertextual approach.

Beyond revolutionizing rock and roll, Bob Dylan became a preacher on stage in the late 1970s, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, opened a series of exhibits of his paintings, wrote three books, worked as a film director, and performed as an actor. Despite his decades in the public eye and vast range of artistic achievements, he remains an enigmatic figure. This book contains original interviews with 13 leading Dylanologists about why Dylan has remained such a compelling and important artist to the present day. Topics discussed are diverse, including his music, his time in cinema and his comparisons to Stanley Kubrick, his spiritual wisdom, and his award-winning poetry.

Ephemeral by nature, the concert setlist is a rich, if underexplored, text for scholarly research. How an artist curates a show is a significant aspect of any concert’s appeal. Through the placement of songs, variations in order, or the omission of material, Bob Dylan’s setlists form a meta-narrative speaking to the power and significance of his music. These essays use the setlists from concerts throughout Dylan’s career to study his approach to his material from the 1960s to the 2020s. These chapters, from various disciplinary perspectives, illustrate how the concert setlist can be used as a source to explore many aspects of Dylan’s public life. Finally, this collection provides a new method to examine other musicians across genres with an interdisciplinary approach to setlists and the selectivity of performance. Unique in its approach and wide-ranging scholarly methodology, this book deepens our understanding of Bob Dylan, the performer.

In Proverb Masters: Shaping the Civil Rights Movement, author Raymond Summerville explores how proverbs and proverbial language played a significant role in the long civil rights era. Proverbs have been used throughout history to share and disseminate brief, powerful statements of truth and philosophical insight. Oftentimes, these sayings have helped unite people in struggles for social justice, serving as rallying cries for just causes. During the civil rights era, proverbs allowed leaders to craft powerful and evocative messages. These statements needed to be made implicitly, as explicit messages were often met with retaliation and even violence. Looking at the autobiographies, biographies, speeches, diaries, letters, and critical texts of Charles W. Chesnutt, Ida B. Wells, A. Philip Randolph, Bob Dylan, Malcom X, Stokely Carmichael, and Septima Clark, the volume analyzes how these figures employed proverbs in support of social justice causes and in civil rights struggles. Summerville argues that these individuals generated enough print material embedded with proverbs and proverbial language that they should be considered proverb masters. With chapters dedicated to each figure, Summerville reveals their adept uses of this powerful linguistic tool.

This book studies Bob Dylan's album Time Out of Mind as a series of dreams. These dreams work on three distinct levels: as murder ballads about a killer awaiting execution, as religious allegory about a protagonist torn between salvation and damnation, and as meditation on race and music in America.

Tbis inquiry may be thought of as a sequel to The Concepts of Value and as an extension of the brief core-vocabulary of aesthetic concepts found in one of the appendices to it. In terms of sheer numbers, most of the value concepts of our language are to be found in the area of human relations and of the aesthetic. There are also other value vocabularies, shorter but equally important, for example, the cognitive and logical. These and other objects of pbilosopbical study (for example, the question of "other minds") deserve the kind of empirical survey that has been made of moral and aesthetic notions, if only to test a priori approaches to them. In the present studyan even more determined empirical approach than that adopted for the first has been found necessary. Once the moral or human value vocabulary has been identified, sentential contexts for the use of the terms readily come to mind. In a study of the language of criticism, however, the vocabulary has first to be sought in the utterances of critics themselves and quoted in sufficient context to make their critical intentions clear. The outcome is that the present study is of great length, about half of it being quotations from critics. The rule adopted for arriving at tbis length go on collecting quotations as long as new types of appraisal came was to to light.