This book argues that the songs on Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding are deeply concerned with the fractures in collective memory and politics contemporary with its composition and recording. The songs are thorough investigations of the ethics of memory in America. Critics and curators frame this song series as a “return to” Dylan’s folk roots and as a “retreat from” the political. Specifically, critics argue that Dylan, on this album, retreats from the explicitly political into the realm of timeless, universal moral concerns (as if these discourses can be so separated). The present book seeks to remedy these oversights and illuminate the reception of Dylan’s songwriting art. The summer of 1967 was understood (by white, middle-class young people) as “The Summer of Love.” For African Americans, 1967 was understood as “The Long, Hot Summer” of racial tension and rioting. Dylan’s aversion to “The Summer of Love” is well documented and John Wesley Harding is understood by critics as yet another step by Dylan away from his audience’s desires. This book examines what the album’s provocation entails; it asserts that the album is a reckoning with the tensions in American memory and history that subtend the explosive “Long, Hot Summer.” The book deploys a method informed by poststructuralism ( especially the work of Jacques Derrida) to a.) dismantle the notion of original and authentic forms and histories to which one can return and b.) explain how this ironic dismantling expresses a deeply felt ethical response to American memory and its discontents. In so doing, the book asks how art can respond to our chaotic and strife-ridden century. “ Bob Dylan Outside the Law is the definitive study of John Wesley Harding , situating it as a singular album addressing the existential questions facing America throughout the long, hot summer of 1967. Reginio’s central argument is that John Wesley Harding reveals Dylan’s close engagement with the era’s failure of the American democracy. He deftly demonstrates this by showing how memory and identity – individual and collective – collapse through an intertextual weaving of narratives – national, historical, and literary – and musical traditions. In particular, through his gorgeous prose and adept application of literary and historical theory, Reginio challenges the paradigm that John Wesley Harding signaled Dylan turning away from political and social engagement. Rather, Reginio argues the album’s style signals a continuation or rewriting of folk traditions inspired by The Basement Tapes sessions and creates a throughline from the more somber and serious songs from those sessions to John Wesley Harding .” (Dr. Erin C. Callahan, Professor of English, San Jacinto College) “ Bob Dylan Outside the Law offers a unique and far-reaching examination of one of Bob Dylan’s most enigmatic albums. Grounded in historical context, Reginio delivers thoughtful and absorbing deep dives into Dylan’s mindset during a turbulent and transformative time. One of the most perceptive thinkers in Dylan Studies, Reginio invites us to rethink not only our understanding of the songs but the songwriter himself. With verve and clarity, he brings John Wesley Harding into dialogue with Franz Kafka, Jacques Derrida, William Blake, Walter Benjamin, and T.S. Eliot, reorienting our understanding of this music, its context, and its significance. More than an album study, this is a work that probes the gnomic heart of Dylan’s relationship to the past—however invented—and to the present—however refracted.” (Dr. Court Carney, Professor of History, Stephen F. Austin State University) “Robert Reginio’s pathbreaking study affirms John Wesley Harding’s status as a creative zenith, acting as a necessary corrective to a clear gap in existing scholarship on the artist. In a series of elegantly written, historically informed close readings, Reginio reinterprets the cryptic story songs as the singer’s deliberately crafted and carefully coded commentary on the political situation of the day, specifically the fear that violence would overtake American politics in the so-called “Summer of Love” (a term that Reginio decisively deconstructs). Bob Dylan Outside the Law feels blazingly contemporary; Reginio’s account of a singer at a crossroads, struggling to make both music and sense out of the political tumult of his time, speaks powerfully to the present-day experience of many Americans. Reginio’s sophisticated but jargon-free readings of the complex rhetoric of John Wesley Harding is a hopeful sign of more “theory friendly” readings of Bob Dylan’s art to come.” (Dr. Barry Faulk, Professor of English, Florida State University) “Robert Reginio’s ultimate goal with Bob Dylan Outside the Law: The Poetics of John Wesley Harding is to show that John Wesley Harding is not a quietist retreat from the moral calamities of the late 60s, but a deeply felt moral and spiritual reckoning inextricable from its moment. He doe