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Francis James Child, compiler and editor of English and Scottish Popular Ballads, established the scholarly study of folk ballads in the English-speaking world. His successors at Harvard University, notably George Lyman Kittredge, Milman Parry, and Albert B. Lord, discovered new ways of relating ideas about sung narrative to the study of epic poetry and what has come to be called - oral literature. In this volume, 16 scholars from Europe and the United States offer original essays in the spirit of these pioneers. The topics of their studies include well-known Child ballads in their British and American forms; aspects of the oral literatures of France, Ireland, Scandinavia, medieval England, ancient Greece, and modern Egypt; and recent literary ballads and popular songs. Many of the essays evince a concern with the theoretical underpinnings of the study of folklore and literature, orality and literacy; and as a whole the volume re-establishes the European ballad in the wider context of oral literature. Among the contributors are Albert B. Lord, Bengt R. Jonsson, Gregory Nagy, David Buchan, Vesteinn Olason, and Karl Reichl.
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.
Originally published by eth co-editor David Hadbawnik's habenicht press in 2012, Ballads uses the lyric form to explore the effects of global Capitalism from a sharp Marxist perspective. Recognizing the congruence between folk song circulation and the circulation of money, the "currency" of the ballad alongside supply-side economics, Owens hails Wordworth's Lyric Ballads experiment (undertaken at the dawn of England's Industrial Age) as one touchstone. But he also understands the built-in obsolescence of the form, its tendency to hearken back to imaginary origins. "[E]veryone has an idea they know what a ballad is," Owens writes in his "Working Notes." "It's this degraded thing shot through with a sense of pastness, cultural infancy and a charming but sometimes dangerous rusticity that needs to be carefully framed and reined." Thus Owens' Ballads playfully engage with language, figures, and forms from medieval and early modern England, with nods to the caesura-based, alliterative line, and Barbara Allan, Thomas the Rhymer, and Piers Plowman making appearances in the book's brief lyrics.
Natascha Würzbach's 1981 study of the street ballad was the first to investigate a specific genre of popular literature which had previously been vastly neglected. Attention is focused on the social and cultural conditions which accompanied its development. It is also looked at as a literary form.
Ballads are a fascinating subject of study not least because of their endless variety. It is quite remarkable that ballads taken down or recorded from singers separated by centuries in time and by hundreds of kilometres in distance, should be both different and yet recognizably the same. In The English Traditional Ballad, David Atkinson examines the ways in which the body of ballads known in England make reference both to ballads from elsewhere and to other English folk songs. The book outlines current theoretical directions in ballad scholarship: structuralism, traditional referentiality, genre and context, print and oral transmission, and the theory of tradition and revival. These are combined to offer readers a method of approaching the central issue in ballad studies - the creation of meaning(s) out of ballad texts. Atkinson focuses on some of the most interesting problems in ballad studies: the 'wit-combat' in versions of The Unquiet Grave; variable perspectives in comic ballads about marriage; incest as a ballad theme; problems of feminine motivation in ballads like The Outlandish Knight and The Broomfield Hill; murder ballads and murder in other instances of early popular literature. Through discussion of these issues and themes in ballad texts, the book outlines a way of tracing tradition(s) in English balladry, while recognizing that ballad tradition is far from being simply chronological and linear.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.
One hundred seventy-six ballads arranged by subject area.