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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... texts. Why they should be appreciated brings us to common-as-universal. Easily circulated and understood, the ballad avoids the bad exclusions of more courtly genres while retaining some of their valued characteristics. After 1660, the ...
... texts for the student on the cusp of “the bookish.” Initiating the student into literary self-consciousness, they also bring him into touch with the roots of the nation, what Gummere calls many decades before Benedict Anderson “the ...
... textual types, like “the maid in love” or the “dashing aristocrat.” So Gay uses the lyric doubleness of the ballad ... texts, the play critiques the invidious distinctions and cruelties that high art creates when it dances to the tune ...
... texts he can interpret correctly are, appropriately enough, old ballads. But when he begins to unpack the political codes buried in these songs, the other characters cannot stand to listen to him and leave the room: “But ifack,—I think ...
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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 |