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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... individual poems and start with narrative, including folk ballads. . . . [O]ur whole efiort was to show how the non-bookish poetry could lead straight to the bookish. —Robert Penn Warren, “Brooks and Warren,” Humanities This page ...
... individual and communal language. The music of the ballad broadens its reach and intensifies its grasp on an audience, its refrain frequently drawing in those who hear it to participate in the singing, whether or not they already know ...
... individual innovation, the ballad's sturdy conventionality can be cast either as a reassuring permanence or as a sign of an imaginative poverty that echoes the material scarcity of the culture in which old songs are found. But however ...
... individual Imagination.10 That lyric is so closely identified with the literary as such is no accident, since it intensifies the mystifications of Literature as a timeless repository of individual genius and national spirit. Despite ...
... individual and the citizen of the liberal nation-state were not in a simply antagonis— tic relationship to “collectivised popular sovereignty” but rather emerged out of a shared “idea of a democratic voice.” At the same time, “popular ...
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 |