Bob Dylan is not a poet. He is a singersongwriter, 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: Words and Music by Bob Dylan, " 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. I “Anyone seriously into Dylan as an artist should have this book.” ― On The Tracks “ Anyone seriously into Dylan as an artist should have this book. ” ― On The Tracks Betsy Bowden is an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University in New Jersey. She is the author of Listeners' Guide to Medieval English: A Discography (Garland, 1988) and Chaucer Aloud: The Varieties of Textual Interpretation (UPenn, 1987).