Timothy Hampton Bücher

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

Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History tells a story about the cultural imagination of the West. Timothy Hampton shows how cheerfulness - a momentary uptick in emotional energy, a temporary lightening of spirit - functions as a theme in the work of major artists from Shakespeare to Louis Armstrong. The book studies both the philosophical construal of cheerfulness - as a theme in Protestant theology, and a category of modern aesthetics - as well as its role as a structuring element in stories and poems. Hampton moves lightly across the work of such crucial figures as Montaigne, Hume, Austen, Emerson, Dickens, and Nietzsche, to trace a new history of the emotional life of European and American culture. In a conclusion, on cheerfulness in pandemic days, Hampton stresses the importance of lightness of mind under the pressure of catastrophe. Hampton offers an original argument on a topic never before systematically studied, casting new light on the history of literature, on the intersections of culture and psychology, and on the history of emotions.