Download or read book The Anglo American Ballad written by Dianne Dugaw and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1995. This book’s collection of key essays presents a coherent overview of touchstone statements and issues in the study of Anglo-American popular ballad traditions and suggests ways this panoramic view affords us a look at Euro-American scholarship’s questions, concerns and methods. The study of ballads in English began early in the eighteenth century with Joseph Addison’s discussions which marked the onset of an aesthetic and scholarly interest in popular traditions. Therefore the collection begins with him and then chronologically includes scholars whose views mark pivotal moments which taken together tell a story that does not emerge through an examination of the ballads themselves. The book addresses debates in tradition, orality, performance and community as well as national genealogies and connections to contexts. Each selected piece is pre-empted by an introductory section on its importance and relevance.

Download or read book The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England written by Patricia Fumerton and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive presentation and examination of a popular seventeenth-century genre: the English broadside ballad 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.

Download or read book Street Ballads in Nineteenth Century Britain Ireland and North America written by David Atkinson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, the assumption that traditional songs originated from a primarily oral tradition has been challenged by research into ’street literature’ - that is, the cheap printed broadsides and chapbooks that poured from the presses of jobbing printers from the late sixteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth. Not only are some traditional singers known to have learned songs from printed sources, but most of the songs were composed by professional writers and reached the populace in printed form. Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America engages with the long-running debate over the origin of traditional songs by examining street literature’s interaction with, and influence on, oral traditions.

Download or read book The Anglo Scottish Ballad and its Imaginary Contexts written by David Atkinson and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2014-03-12 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The English Traditional Ballad written by David Atkinson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Ballad Collection Lyric and the Canon written by Steve Newman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Ljudske balade med izro ilom in sodobnostjo written by Marjetka Golež and published by Založba ZRC. This book was released on 1998 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: V zborniku je petindvajset razprav raziskovalcev iz vsega sveta od Anglije, Bolgarije, Danske, Finske, Hrvaške, Madžarske, Makedonije, Mehike, Romunije, Rusije, Škotske, Walesa do ZDA in seveda Slovenije. Razprave so pregled mednarodnega raziskovanja ljudskih balad in predstavljajo, kako se tokovi preteklega in odsevi zgodovinskih časov, arhetipske zgodbe prepletajo z vdorom naših kulturnih in družbenih razmer tudi v nastajanje, odmiranje in ponovno oživljanje balad, tako da njihovo raziskovanje prinaša neizogibne spremembe.

Download or read book Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550 1640 written by Tessa Watt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at popular belief through a detailed study of the cheapest printed wares in London in the century after the Reformation.

Download or read book The Business of Books written by James Raven and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2007-08-22 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1450 very few English men or women were personally familiar with a book; by 1850, the great majority of people daily encountered books, magazines, or newspapers. This book explores the history of this fundamental transformation, from the arrival of the printing press to the coming of steam. James Raven presents a lively and original account of the English book trade and the printers, booksellers, and entrepreneurs who promoted its development. Viewing print and book culture through the lens of commerce, Raven offers a new interpretation of the genesis of literature and literary commerce in England. He draws on extensive archival sources to reconstruct the successes and failures of those involved in the book trade—a cast of heroes and heroines, villains, and rogues. And, through groundbreaking investigations of neglected aspects of book-trade history, Raven thoroughly revises our understanding of the massive popularization of the book and the dramatic expansion of its markets over the centuries.

Download or read book Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth Century England written by Robert D. Storch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-17 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1982, this book is concerned with the tensions between continuity and change in customs, rituals, beliefs of artisans, factory workers and sections of the lower middle classes in the nineteenth century. It explores a range of factors which contributed to changes in custom, including the effects of urbanisation, conflict over the use of public land, new conceptions of public order, the decline of the oral tradition and the growth of a new recreational nexus in the larger cities. Drawing on material from all parts of the British Isles, the book demonstrates the enormous variety and diversity of popular tradition. This book will be of interest to those studying Victorian history.

Download or read book Street Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century written by David Atkinson and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-08-21 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries, street literature was the main cheap reading material of the working classes: broadsides, chapbooks, songsters, prints, engravings, and other forms of print produced specifically to suit their taste and cheap enough for even the poor to buy. Starting in the sixteenth century, but at its chaotic and flamboyant peak in the nineteenth, street literature was on sale everywhere – in urban streets and alleyways, at country fairs and markets, at major sporting events and holiday gatherings, and under the gallows at public executions. For this very reason, it was often despised and denigrated by the educated classes, but remained enduringly popular with the ordinary people. Anything and everything was grist to the printers’ mill, if it would sell. A penny could buy you a celebrity scandal, a report of a gruesome murder, the last dying speech of a condemned criminal, wonder tales, riddles and conundrums, a moral tale of religious danger and redemption, a comic tale of drunken husbands and shrewish wives, a temperance tract or an ode to beer, a satire on dandies, an alphabet or “reed-a-ma-daisy” (reading made easy) to teach your children, an illustrated chapbook of nursery rhymes, or the adventures of Robin Hood and Jack the Giant Killer. Street literature long held its own by catering directly for the ordinary people, at a price they could afford, but, by the end of the Victorian era, it was in terminal decline and was rapidly being replaced by a host of new printed materials in the shape of cheap newspapers and magazines, penny dreadful novels, music hall songbooks, and so on, all aimed squarely at the burgeoning mass market. Fascinating today for the unique light it shines on the lives of the ordinary people of the age, street literature has long been neglected as a historical resource, and this collection of essays is the first general book on the trade for over forty years.

Download or read book Merchants Barons Sellers and Suits written by Christa Mahalik and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-08-11 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Merchants, Barons, Sellers and Suits: The Changing Images of the Businessman through Literature originally began as a conversation about a hybrid course at Quinnipiac University. Its purpose was to take an online English course for non-traditional business majors and create a theme that would be relevant to the business world. Being given the task to create this course from the ground up was exciting and intriguing. There turned out to be a lot more material that could be used for this theme than previously thought. To gauge the temperature of the topic, a panel was set up with the theme of businessmen (or women) and their changing image through literature. At the 2009 NeMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association) conference in Boston, the panel was held and many ideas, such as some of the ones presented in this book, were discussed. A secondary theme evolved out of the construction of the first. Participants discussed the environment as a catalyst in the change of “what a person actually thinks a businessman (or woman) looks like.” Many of these images were formed based upon pop culture, such as the traveling salesman in the Looney Tunes cartoons who sells brushes door to door and hails from Walla Walla, Washington. Others were based on the images read about in books, such as Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman. The essays included in this volume, presented by doctoral candidates and scholars from across a range of geographical regions and disciplines, result in a collection that investigates the idea of the changing image of the businessman throughout literature both in America and in Europe. The arrangement of the collection is a comparative timeline allowing the changing images of business to evolve with each essay.

Download or read book Writing in Nonstandard English written by Irma Taavitsainen and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2000-02-15 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates linguistic variation as a complex continuum of language use from standard to nonstandard. In our view, these notions can only be established through mutual definition, and they cannot exist without the opposite pole. What is considered standard English changes according to the approach at hand, and the nonstandard changes accordingly. This book offers an interdisciplinary and multifaceted approach to this central theme of wide interest. The articles approach writing in nonstandard language through various disciplines and methodologies: sociolinguistics, pragmatics, historical linguistics, dialectology, corpus linguistics, and ideological and political points of view. The theories and methods from these fields are applied to material that ranges from nonliterary writing to canonized authors. Dialects, regional varieties and worldwide Englishes are also addressed.

Download or read book Literacy and Popular Culture written by David Vincent and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-07-30 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1750, half the population were unable to sign their names; by 1914 England, together with handful of advanced Western countries, had for the first time in history achieved a nominally literate society. This book seeks to understand how and why literacy spread into every interstice of English society, and what impact it had on the lives and minds of the common people.

Download or read book Warrior Women and Popular Balladry 1650 1850 written by Dianne Dugaw and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1996-01-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Masquerading as a man, seeking adventure, going to war or to sea for love and glory, the transvestite heroine flourished in all kinds of literature, especially ballads, from the Renaissance to the Victorian age. Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 identifies this heroine and her significance as a figure in folklore, and as a representative of popular culture, prompting important reevaluations of gender and sexuality. Dugaw has uncovered a fascination with women cross-dressers in the popular literature of early modern Europe and America. Surveying a wide range of Anglo-American texts from popular ballads and chapbook life histories to the comedies and tragedies of aristocratic literature, she demonstrates the extent to which gender and sexuality are enacted as constructs of history.

Download or read book Understanding Popular Culture written by Steven L. Kaplan and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-01-02 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Popular Culture

Download or read book Vernacular Bodies written by Mary E. Fissell and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2004-11-25 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making babies was a mysterious process in early modern England. Mary Fissell employs a wealth of popular sources - ballads, jokes, witchcraft pamphlets, Prayer Books, popular medical manuals - to produce the first account of women's reproductive bodies in early-modern cheap print. Since little was certain about the mysteries of reproduction, the topic lent itself to a rich array of theories. The insides of women's reproductive bodies provided a kind of open interpretive space, a place where many different models of reproductive processes might be plausible. These models were profoundly shaped by cultural concerns; they afforded many ways to discuss and make sense of social, political, and economic changes such as the Protestant Reformation and the Civil War. They gave ordinary people ways of thinking about the changing relations between men and women that characterized these larger social shifts. Fissell offers a new way to think about the history of the body by focusing on women's bodies, showing how ideas about conception, pregnancy, and childbirth were also ways of talking about gender relations and thus all relations of power. Where other histories of the body have focused on learned texts and male bodies, this study looks at the small books and pamphlets that ordinary people read and listened to - and provides new ways to understand how such people experienced political conflicts and social change.