{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.04994686503719448, 'fraction_numerical': 0.010095642933049946, 'mean_word_length': 4.829721362229102, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Performed Literature: Words and Music by Bob Dylan (review)

to do better than anyone is situate a text not only in relation to its many examples (versions) but also in relation to the traditional song corpus with whose members it shares motifs, themes and commonplaces” (pp. 49–50). To this end, he makes a careful study of the “Oh Willie”/”Butcher Boy” family of songs. It is a welcome feature of the book that Renwick includes the words (but regrettably not the music) of entire songs—no less than sixteen from the “Oh Willie” network are included. Another essay studies the relationship between the death-cell contemplations of the American “Rambling Boy,” listed by Laws as L12, and the British “Wild and Wicked Youth.” He concludes that the United States versions privilege “the individual’s experience over his or her effect over the social order” and are less “ideological” (p. 46). He is exhilarated by the heady air of the Appalachians, “where any ‘social philosophy’ or ideological ‘system’ was automatically subject to suspicion and rejection” (p. 56). Herein lies this excellent book’s weakness. In renouncing theory as a tool in folksong scholarship, the author of the famous structuralist essay in English Folk Poetry (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980) on the semiotics of sexual liaisons doth surely protest too much. Renwick’s criticism of theory as “totalitarian” (p. xiii) is probably a slip for “totalizing,” but one cannot be sure. Instead, we are asked to accept a “commonsense premise” of song distribution (p. 36), as if common sense is somehow exempt from ideology, while his Romantic organicism leads him to a position where songs apparently have an existence like aging relatives, quite independent of their singers: “Oh, Willie,” we are told, “enjoys its own life” (p. 115). Sadly, if there is no escaping texts, there is no escaping theory either.