Timothy Hampton Livres

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

A close examination of Bob Dylan's songs that locates his transgressive style within a long history of modern (and modernist) art. The 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature recognized Bob Dylan as a major modern artist, elevating his work beyond the world of popular music. In this book, Timothy Hampton focuses on the details and nuances of Dylan's songs, showing how they work as artistic statements designed to create meaning and elicit emotion. With Bob Dylan's Poetics, Hampton offers a unique examination of both the poetics and politics of Dylan's compositions. He studies Dylan not as a pop hero, but as an artist, as a maker of songs. Focusing on the interplay of music and lyric, Hampton 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 to his densely allusive more recent recordings, Hampton offers a detailed account of Dylan's achievement. Locating Dylan in the long history of artistic modernism, he examines the relationships among form, genre, and the political and social themes that crisscross Dylan's work. With this book, Hampton 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.

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.

Historians of early modern Europe have long stressed how new practices of diplomacy that emerged during the period transformed European politics. Fictions of Embassy is the first book to examine the cultural implications of the rise of modern...