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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... 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 while framing it so that it remains tied to a common nationality. Constituting ...
... Player and the Beggar who has putatively written the play: Player. But, honest Friend, I hope you don't intend that Macheath shall be really executed. Beggar. Most certainly, Sir.—-To make the Piece perfect, I was for doing strict ...
... play by John Brewer, one that exemplifies the critique of the aesthetic in recent eighteenth-century studies ... playing cards and other trinkets blunting his political message.5 So just as the Beggar's idea of poetic justice is vitiated ...
... play—is found among persons of all classes. Gay gives the screw an— other turn by revealing that if the ballad grounds a model of subjectivity in which one can identify with others' emotions, it also ironically teaches that not only ...
... play critiques the invidious distinctions and cruelties that high art creates when it dances to the tune called by ... plays of the eighteenth century, one of the two or three most often found in our current anthologies, and a favorite ...
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 |