Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Ballad and Its Pasts: Literary Histories and the Play of Memory

The Ballad and Its Pasts: Literary Histories and the Play of Memory

Atkinson, David

Hardcover

Literary CriticismCountry & Folk

ISBN10: 1843844923
ISBN13: 9781843844921
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Inc
Published: Mar 16 2018
Pages: 242
Weight: 1.14
Height: 0.56 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

The ballad genre, and its material, are frequently backward-looking in terms of subject and style: it is ideally suited to the reimagining of past events, both real and fictional. This volume addresses the past of the ballad and the past in the ballad. It challenges existing scholarship by embracing discontinuity rather than continuity, seeing the ballad as belonging to a culture of cheap print and imaginative literature rather than the rarefied construct of a mythical folk. It finds a conscious antiquarianism and medievalism reinterpreting the genre at different stages of its literary history, at the same time as the ballad itself is continually adapting to the needs of readers, singers, and audience. Chapters cover the few remaining examples of the medieval ballad, and Thomas Percy's medievalism; David Mallet's William and Margaret and the beginnings of the gothic mode early in the eighteenth century; ballads of Sir James the Rose and the culture of cheap print in Scotland from the late eighteenth through to the early twentieth century; shipwreck ballads on the loss of the Ramillies and Sir Patrick Spens, and the reimagining of the past in the present, with a diversion into Coleridge's Dejection: An Ode; murder ballads, special providence, and the history of mentalities from early modern to Victorian times. David Atkinson is Honorary Research Fellow at the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen.

Also in

Literary Criticism

View All