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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... Gay's attempt to find “poetic justice” beyond the cruelty of the gallows and the moral stupidity of opera in The Beggar's Opera (Chapter 1), Allan Ramsay's carving out a sphere for the Scottish literati outside of an Anglocentric state ...
... Gay's attempt at satire. Faced with a threat by “commercial culture” to their tenuous purchase on cultural capital, authors like Gay (an ex-linen-draper's apprentice from a once—powerful provincial family) who aspired to high status ...
... Gay seeks depends upon the ballads that stand in place of the arias we expect in an opera, and understanding Gay's canny revaluation of the ballad will require excursions into the work of other collectors who influence him and who also ...
... Gay uses the lyric doubleness of the ballad—individual speech and communal song—to undermine the ruling classes' presumptuous monopoly on subjectivity. This flat/round model of subjectivity shapes Gay's vision of the relationship ...
... Gay's revision of “poetic justice” requires an excursion through the prolific career of the author of “Cold and Raw,” Thomas D'Urfey. It will take us from the Royalist balladry of the 1640s to the unsettled world of the Restoration ...
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 |