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The Drifter’s Escape

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Abstract

One of Dylan’s albums in the 1990s was called World Gone Wrong. The title has a wider resonance. It expresses the particular conception of politics and the political which informs so much of his work. Many of his songs depict a world which is fundamentally disordered and from which, as a consequence, people are alienated and disaffected. Alienation is one of Dylan’s major themes, but his account of how human beings become alienated and his recommendations as to how we should respond to it are many-sided and complex. There is no single perspective or attitude which he consistently presents. The changes through which his work has passed and the constant reinventions of himself have contributed to this, but the ambivalence goes deeper and is reflected in songs at every stage of his career.

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© 2004 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Gamble, A. (2004). The Drifter’s Escape. In: Boucher, D., Browning, G. (eds) The Political Art of Bob Dylan. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522541_2

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