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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... verse to music, like John Gay and Robert Burns. But even those who do not write songs for musical performance, like John Home and William Wordsworth, draw on the communal orientation intimated by the ballad's ontology as song. They see ...
... verse. This is the culmination of a dual narrative of per— sonal and national development emergent in the Long Eighteenth Century in which the ballad gains definition as the favored text of childhood and the nation's early days. Set ...
... verse designed to be sung) and its common-ness, for these are the elements that make it most attractive for writers trying to figure out how to adapt to fundamental changes in the structure of elite literary production, circulation, and ...
... verses set to the tune “Cold and Raw”: If any Wench Venus's girdle wear, Though she be never so ugly; Lillys and Roses will quickly appear, And her Face look wond'rous smuggly. Beneath the left Ear so fit but a Cord, (A Rope so charming ...
... verse written during the Interregnum, adding to it the exhaustion that came with the epicurean delights of the Court. This aristocratic fixation on oblivion is perhaps most familiar from Rochester's “Upon Nothing,” which ends by ...
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 |