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? Exploring the widespread breach of the wall that separated "high" and "low," Steve Newman challenges our current understanding of lyric poetry. He shows how the lesser lyric of the ballad changed lyric poetry as a whole and, in so doing, helped to transform literature from polite writing in general into the body of imaginative writing that became known as the English literary canon. For Newman, the ballad's early lack of prestige actually increased its value for elite authors after 1660. Easily circulated and understood, ballads moved literature away from the exclusive domain of the courtly, while keeping it rooted in English history and culture. Indeed, elite authors felt freer to rewrite and reshape the common speech of the ballad. Newman also shows how the ballad allowed authors to access the "common" speech of the public sphere, while avoiding what they perceived as the unpalatable qualities of that same public's increasingly avaricious commercial society.
This is the first book to combine contemporary debates in ballad studies with the insights of modern textual scholarship. Just like canonical literature and music, the ballad should not be seen as a ...uniquely authentic item inextricably tied to a documented source, but rather as an unstable structure subject to the vagaries of production, reception, and editing. Among the matters addressed are topics central to the subject, including ballad origins, oral and printed transmission, sound and writing, agency and editing, and textual and melodic indeterminacy and instability. While drawing on the time-honoured materials of ballad studies, the book offers a theoretical framework for the discipline to complement the largely ethnographic approach that has dominated in recent decades. Primarily directed at the community of ballad and folk song scholars, the book will be of interest to researchers in several adjacent fields, including folklore, oral literature, ethnomusicology, and textual scholarship.
Si bé la narcocultura s’associa amb el Mèxic de finals del segle XX i inicis del XXI, aquest fenomen cultural té les seves arrels en les primeres dècades del segle XX. Aquest assaig explora els ...orígens de la narcocultura fent una revisió del que probablement és el primer narcocorrido. “El Pablote” va ser gravat en 1931 i dedicat al narcotraficant de Ciudad Juárez Pablo González, conegut com a Pablote així com el rei de la morfina a Ciudad Juárez.
The early modern period witnessed large scale global expansion and interconnectivity. This thesis demonstrates that broadside ballads provide an insight into how their consumers imagined the outside ...world during a highly dynamic period. Through their liminal form (amalgams of tunes, texts, woodcut images and public performances), ballads created emotional communal moments which embedded their representations of the outside world in the minds of the audience. This study focuses on ballads describing non-European people and places. These constitute a minority of the total ballad corpus and have often been overlooked, or not placed into a wider, global context. By analysing representations of sailors, the dangers of the sea, the Americas, and the Islamic World, I demonstrate how the early modern global world was imagined. Ballads comment upon the outside world, emphasise the human cost of enriching the nation and were significant in the colonial enterprises of early modern joint-stock companies. They frame foreign cultures in varying and contradicting ways depending on prevailing political interests. The significance of this study is that it emphasises the ways in which the global world informed ballads and is reflected in them. By analysing ballad narratives within their cultural and production contexts, highlighting the web of connections that joins them to other literary forms, and incorporating the contemporary knowledge held by the audience, we can analyse how different works and events would have been received.
In its seventeenth-century heyday, the English broadside ballad was a single large sheet of paper printed on one side with multiple woodcut illustrations, a popular tune title, and a poem. ...Inexpensive, ubiquitous, and fugitive—individual elements migrated freely from one broadside to another—some 11, 000 to 12, 000 of these artifacts pre-1701 survive, though many others have undoubtedly been lost. Since 2003, Patricia Fumerton and a team of associates at the University of California, Santa Barbara have been finding, digitizing, cataloging, and recording these materials to create the English Broadside Ballad Archive.In this magisterial and long-awaited volume, Fumerton presents a rich display of the fruits of this work. She tracks the fragmentary assembling and disassembling of two unique extant editions of one broadside ballad and examines the loose network of seventeenth-century ballad collectors who archived what were essentially ephemeral productions. She pays particular attention to Samuel Pepys, who collected and bound into five volumes more than 1, 800 ballads, and whose preoccupations with black-letter print, gender, and politics are reflected in and extend beyond his collecting practices. Offering an extensive and expansive reading of an extremely popular and sensational ballad that was printed at least 37 times before 1701, Fumerton highlights the ballad genre's ability to move audiences across time and space. In a concluding chapter, she looks to Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale to analyze the performative potential ballads have in comparison with staged drama.A broadside ballad cannot be "read" without reading it in relation to its images and its tune, Fumerton argues. To that end, The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England features more than 80 illustrations and directs its readers to a specially constructed online archive where they can easily access 48 audio files of ballad music.
In the symbolic language of ballads, a lady's costly dress tells of the beauty of the body beneath it or of the wearer's happiness; a lost hawk or hound foreshadows the hunter's fate long before the ...plot reaches a turning point. In her original and far-reaching study of such familiar narrative elements, Edith Randam Rogers adds much to our understanding of poetic expression in the ballad tradition.
In focusing on individual motifs as they appear in different ballads, different languages, and different periods, Rogers proves the existence of a reliable lingua franca of symbolism in European balladry. Lines or even whole stanzas that have defied interpretation often come to life when the reader is aware of the meaning of a particular motif in such an international vocabulary of images. Thus this book makes available important new critical tools sure to have significant results for ballad scholarship.
Tristram Potter Coffin’s The British Traditional Ballad in North America, published in 1950, became recognized as the standard reference to the published material on the Child ballad in North ...America. Centering on the theme of story variation, the book examines ballad variation in general, treats the development of the traditional ballad into an art form, and provides a bibliographical guide to story variation as well as a general bibliography of titles referred to in the guide. Roger deV. Renwick’s supplement to The British Traditional Ballad in North America provides a thorough review of all sources of North American ballad materials published from 1963, the date of the last revision of the original volume, to 1977. The references, which include published text fragments and published title lists of items in archival collections, are arranged according to each ballad’s story variations. Textual and thematic comparisons among ballads in the British and American tradition are made throughout. In his introductory essay Renwick synthesizes the various theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of variation that have appeared in scholarly publications since 1963 and provides examples from texts referred to in the bibliographical guide itself. The supplement, like its parent work, is an invaluable reference tool for the study of variation in ballad form, content, and style. Together with the reprinted text of the 1963 edition, the supplement provides an exhaustive bibliography to the literature on the British traditional ballad in North America.
This volume is intended as a belated but heartfelt thank-you and Gedenkschrift to the late Larry Syndergaard (1936-2015), long-time professor of English at Western Michigan University and Fellow of ...the Kommission für Volksdichtung (International Ballad Commission). Larry’s contributions down the decades to ballad studies--particularly Scandinavian and Anglophone--included dozens of papers and articles, as well as his supremely useful book, English Translations of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballads. As David Atkinson and Thomas A. McKean of the Kommission have written (May 2015): “Larry... was a sound scholar with a penetrating mind which he used to support, encourage and befriend others, rather than show off his own knowledge. He will be remembered for his contributions to international balladry, especially for providing a bridge between the English- and Scandinavian-language ballads.” Larry’s particular fascination with the vernacular ballads of the northern medieval world are reflected in this collection; topics here range from plot elements such as demonic whales, otherworldly antagonists, and mer-people to thematic issues of genre, religion and sexual mores. As a tribute to the global influence of Larry’s scholarship and the broad academic interest in medieval ballads, the essays in this volume were contributed by twelve international scholars of narrative song based in Europe, North America and Australia.
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