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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... 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 while framing it so that it remains tied to a common nationality. Constituting the ballad ...
... ; 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 the essay. But it is in these overlaps and Introduction 7.
... essay. But it is in these overlaps and internal divisions that we also see the limits of genre understood in terms of taxonomy. While taxonomy may allow us to name ballad as a subgenre of lyric, it tends to underplay the way that forms ...
... essays. For his part, Coleridge turns to “Children” as an answer to his pained question as to why he publishes at all, drawing on Iean Paul's excuse for making a book—that it allows the author to exceed the “narrow circle of love ...
... essay (if one of the two authors of The Spectator can be said to be its stylistic model, it is Addison), Gay makes polite readers sympathize more directly with the whores and thieves who sing them. That act of sympathy challenges high ...
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 |
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Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the ... Steve Newman No preview available - 2007 |