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? |
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The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism Steve Newman. This page intentionally left blank Introduction Ballads run like a radioactive dye through elite literature.
... elite literature in the eighteenth century and beyond, illuminating the structures and workings of high culture. Authors happen across ballads on the walls of country houses and city streets, hear them bawled out in London and Edinburgh ...
... elite authors. Because ballads are merely “common,” elite authors are not intimidated by them; they feel freer to rewrite ballads, to show their poetic license to slum with a lower genre, and to make them object lessons in appreciating ...
... elite authors engage in the phenomenon scholars have named the Ballad Revival, though, as many have pointed out, it is elite literature and not the traditional ballad itself that is “revived.”6 Authors collect ballads not only into ...
... elite consciousness. If this stimulates a nostalgia often informed by a complacent scheme of personal and national development, it also enrolls ballads in a debate that continues to this day, over who has and has not been included in a ...
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 |