Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New CriticismUniversity of Pennsylvania Press, 2013 M04 23 - 304 pages The humble ballad, defined in 1728 as "a song commonly sung up and down the streets," was widely used in elite literature in the eighteenth century and beyond. Authors ranging from John Gay to William Blake to Felicia Hemans incorporated the seemingly incongruous genre of the ballad into their work. Ballads were central to the Scottish Enlightenment's theorization of culture and nationality, to Shakespeare's canonization in the eighteenth century, and to the New Criticism's most influential work, Understanding Poetry. Just how and why did the ballad appeal to so many authors from the Restoration period to the end of the Romantic era and into the twentieth century? |
From inside the book
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... first two epigraphs reveal, Addison and Coleridge, despite their many differences, are both drawn to the much reprinted ballad of “The Children in the Wood.” While Addison's reader will think he is “not serious” and although Coleridge ...
... first is “common” as undistinguished or as nonelite; the second is “common” as universal. Under the sign of the first “common,” the ballad lacks the prestige of high genres, carrying with it the nosewrinkling savor of Grub Street. But ...
... first poem of childhood, learned from nurse or mother, and/or as a relic of the national past, it can then be recognized as an object of elite consciousness. If this stimulates a nostalgia often informed by a complacent scheme of ...
... first is that genres cannot be properly understood in isolation; lyric is not only internally complicated by the ballad but is also comprehensible only within an overlapping array that includes pastoral and also nonpoetic genres l9 like ...
... first intended, it would have carried a most excellent Moral. 'Twould have shown that the lower Sort of People have their Vices in a degree as well as the Rich: And that they are punish'd for them” (22-26). So Gay suggests that his era ...
Contents
1 | |
15 | |
Pastoral Progress and the Lyric Split in Allan Ramsay John Home and Robert Burns | 44 |
Collecting Shakespeares SongsShakespeare as Song Collector | 97 |
4 Ballads and the Problem of Lyric Violence in Blake and Wordsworth | 136 |
Child Ballads Childrens Ballads and the New Criticism | 185 |
Notes | 229 |
Bibliography | 263 |
Index | 283 |
Acknowledgments | 293 |
Other editions - View all
Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the ... Steve Newman No preview available - 2007 |