The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan skilfully avoids the two perils that any study of an iconic figure from popular culture risks. Firstly, it manages to avoid slipping into hagiography: this is not a tiresome exercise in hero worship in academic guise. Secondly, the collection resists being impenetrable: the essays are accessible and relevant, even for the non-aficionado of Dylan's work. Taken together, these two qualities make the volume a worthy contribution to the Cambridge Companions to American Studies, alongside those devoted to Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Malcolm X. This serves to highlight another important feature of the volume: Dylan is being appraised here not as a composer, poet, or musician but as something much broader – namely a key figure in American culture and history.

Kevin J. H. Dettmar provides an accurate record of the wealth of critical analyses of Bob Dylan: in short, Dylan is now part of the ‘lexicon of higher education’ (8) or, as Richard Goldstein playfully sums it up, the world of ‘Ph.Dylanology’ (9), and it is worth mentioning that Lee Marshall's essay in this volume (‘Bob Dylan and the Academy’) does an effective job of analysing Dylan's ‘academic’ status. As editor, Dettmar is keen to reclaim Dylan from the apoliticization wrought on him by the New Criticism. Hence this collection never ignores the social and political dimension of Dylan's music, which is seen as thoroughly permeating the œuvre far beyond the ‘protest song’ era. At the same time Dettmar believes that any questions about Dylan's credentials as a ‘literary’ artist are ‘laid to rest’ (4) by this Companion. This is certainly true, and the range and skill of writing and approach on display here make for an exciting collection. However, it is worth emphasizing that Dylan is not predominantly a literary figure, and in some ways the collection does not entirely engage with the music. This is evident in the limited vocabulary that some of the authors seem to possess for music: hence, in one essay, the lyrical complexity of ‘She Belongs to Me’ is well explored, but the music is simply ‘warm and sweet’ (133). However, some writers do unravel the music: for example, the repeated finger-picking and identical chord progressions in a clutch of Dylan's finest early songs is sagely interpreted by Eric Bulson as evidence that Dylan had ‘stumbled on a formula that worked’, permitting him to examine the ‘dimensions of his own sadness, anger, and pain’ (128). It is at these moments that Dylan is not simply a poet, a musician, or a composer but the ultimate hybrid: the singer-songwriter par excellence.

The collection is structured in two parts. The first is concerned with ‘Perspectives’, and the second, shorter part provides eight case studies of what it describes as ‘Landmark Albums’. ‘Perspectives’ approaches Dylan's œuvre in terms of specific themes. These nine essays – all with titles beginning ‘Bob Dylan and’ or ‘Bob Dylan as’ – range from locating Dylan within musical and creative traditions to analyses of Dylan as an artist or icon, some also teasing out such complex topics as Dylan's relationship to religion or gender issues. Essays such as Anthony DeCurtis's ‘Bob Dylan as Songwriter’, Alan Light's ‘Bob Dylan as Performer’, and David R. Shumway's ‘Bob Dylan as Cultural Icon’ grapple with these essential and pertinent topics with compelling fluidity. Martin Jacobi (in ‘Bob Dylan and Collaboration’) does an impressive job of negotiating an especially prickly aspect of an artist who has never been ‘forthcoming about or particularly appreciative’ (69) of the substantial help he has received throughout his career. Dylan's biography informs all the analyses in the collection, albeit in diverse ways. The way in which the essays utilize the narrative, anecdotes, and the evolution of Dylan's life demonstrates the value of such an approach: as with such contemporaries as Frank Zappa or John Lennon, or literary antecedents like Lord Byron or Joseph Conrad, Dylan's fully-lived life with all its unfathomable ambiguities and prolific achievements is thoroughly enmeshed in, yet never overwhelmed by, the tumult of his rapidly changing times – in effect, the life becomes part of the œuvre.

The second part of the Companion, ‘Landmark Albums’, presents comparatively short, often personal analyses of albums, from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963)Footnote ¹ to “Love and Theft” (2001).Footnote ² They are, by and large, successful examples of concise and focused evaluation. Michael Coyle and Debra Rae Cohen offer a pleasurable analysis of Blonde on Blonde (1966)Footnote ³ – tellingly abbreviated to BOB – with convincing analysis of the titles’ and lyrics’ textual complexities and multiple ironies. Carrie Brownstein's analysis of Blood on the Tracks (1975)Footnote ⁴ is enjoyable for its personal framing: born in the same month the album was recorded, Brownstein evocatively and truthfully states that she cannot know ‘what life was like without it’ (155). From here she provides a succinct account of the album's genesis and production before offering a convincing exploration of its meaning, reception, and legacy. Alex Abramovich's investigation of The Basement Tapes (1967, 1975)Footnote ⁵ begins with Dylan's motorbike accident and then recounts how, despite a disappearance from public life, Dylan and the Band spent most of 1967 in the tiny basement of the house called Big Pink and recorded over one hundred songs. Abramovich subsequently disentangles the life of the recordings, both as highly prized bootlegs and in the sanitized versions Columbia released in the 1970s, before concluding with an account of the Big Pink space itself. There are many pleasures in the volume as a whole, but the final essay of this section, Eric Lott's exploration of the album “Love and Theft” (2001), is a particular gem given the identity of the author: Lott wrote a seminal 1993 multidisciplinary study of blackface minstrelsy also entitled Love and Theft. Lott's account of having a title ‘borrowed’ by Dylan (the album's quotation marks are all-important), which precedes his exploration of Dylan's musical heritage and his close analysis of the album, is as delightful as it is deftly written.

Although I have celebrated the collection's success in steering clear of hagiography, it is in the ‘Landmark Albums’ section that there is, on occasion, a straying towards hyperbole. For instance, one cannot help but feel that Jean Tamarin's assertion that imagining a world without Dylan is like trying to imagine the world without the internet – ‘the architecture of existence minus an entire dimension’ (131) – risks bathos. While Dylan devotees and converts would happily concur, one wonders how this reads to, for argument's sake, the next generation of scholars who might well have first encountered Dylan advertising underwear for Victoria's Secret in 2004. But Dylan has never been anything if not perplexing and unpredictable, and this can make critical analyses provocative and personal – and absolutely none the worse for that. Certainly, the concise appraisals of these key albums do leave one wanting more: the albums not included, such as Planet Waves (1974),Footnote ⁶Desire (1976),Footnote ⁷ and Modern Times (2006),Footnote ⁸ would have offered rich pickings, and although Nashville Skyline (1969)Footnote ⁹ is summarily dismissed by Dettmar as ‘second-rate’ (10), there is nonetheless an interesting story to tell, an analysis that might be all the stronger with a particularly sharp blade. However, wanting an encore is inevitable. Dylan's achievements consist of dozens and dozens of albums, interesting sidelines in writing and artwork, and late revelations such as the three series of Theme Time Radio Hour (2006–9)Footnote ¹⁰ and the autobiography Chronicles: Volume One (2004).Footnote ¹¹ In short, Bob Dylan criticism could be as never-ending as Dylan's ‘Never Ending Tour’. In his song ‘Nettie Moore’ (2006) Dylan sings that ‘the world of research has gone berserk: too much paperwork’, but The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan is a welcome demonstration of contemporary research and scholarship at its most fluent and apposite.