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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... critiques of the rise of Literature in the eighteenth century, particularly as it bears on the relationship of elite to popular culture. According to these accounts, belles lettres separates itself from the sullying world of popular ...
... critique of the twentieth, the nostalgia exemplified by Walter Scott's historical novels gains the cultural upper hand and so the ballad becomes primarily a tool of imperialism. It is true that elite authors who shake hands with the ...
... critique of more recent studies, which uncover its lack of empirical evidence or its logocentric fantasies. But the dichotomy between orality and print does not obtain for Addison, Coleridge, and many other elite authors interested in ...
... critique of the aesthetic in recent eighteenth-century studies. According to Brewer, Gay seeks to expose the injustices of Walpole's England, and he does this on a formal level by combining a variety of genres ranging from opera to Grub ...
... critiques the invidious distinctions and cruelties that high art creates when it dances to the tune called by the powers that be. Gay departs both from D'Urfey's adherence to an outdated courtly model of culture and Addison and Steele's ...
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 |