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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... Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) but also into their poems, plays, and essays. Collection is their way of accessing the ballad's collectivity, a way to take advantage of the ballad's circulation as a cheap commodity ...
... Percy, as well as the various critics, scholars, textbook writers, and teachers discussed in the final chapter. Some of these choices can be attributed to the exigency of space; this does not pretend to be an exhaustive study of the ...
... Percy and Joseph Ritson use the ballad to construct competing versions of what I call a“lyric history” (Chapter 3) that exploits gaps in the record to produce accounts of change and continuity. Or how Blake and Wordsworth react against ...
... all of the ballad collectors up to and including Thomas Percy as driven by a desire for patronage from the reactionary powers that be, a desire that “predis— posed them to patronize or even to expropriate the products Introduction 9.
... Percy's Reliques is driven by Ritson's republican views. There are also other, subtler differences. For some, the ballad acts as a way to manage historical change, as in Walter Scott's accommodation of nostalgia for traditional Scot ...
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 |