Best Selling Books by Betsy Bowden

Bob Dylan is not a poet. He is a singer-songwriter, a performing artist. The unit of his art, as collected and documented by his intended audience, is the live performance. Right now, no existing technological tool can give researchers ready access to his entire corpus of work. Revised from the author's Ph.D. dissertation (UC Berkeley, 1978) and again from its first edition (Indiana UP, 1982), Performed Literature develops a methodology for close analysis of verbal art that is heard, not seen, using as comparative examples 24 performances of 11 songs by Bob Dylan. The second edition adds a preface, two major appendices and one minor one, and a detailed index.

This study investigates interpretation of a late-fourteenth-century fictional character in both verbal and visual art of the period 1660–1810. Audiovisual analysis and diachronic afterlife studies intertwine concerning the Wife of Bath in songs, scholarship, commentary, poetic paraphrases, musical theater in London and on the Continent, paintings, and book illustrations.

From the middle of the twentieth century, dozens of medievalists and other performers have recorded early English. Many educational institutions already own sound recordings of English before 1500, or may wish to purchase the most useful ones available. This discography aims to assist teachers, administrators and librarians to make the best use of their resources.