The Ballad and Its Pasts: Literary Histories and the Play of Memory. David Atkinson. Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2018. Pp. xvi+226.

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe Ballad and Its Pasts: Literary Histories and the Play of Memory. David Atkinson. Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2018. Pp. xvi+226.Steve NewmanSteve NewmanTemple University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe Ballad and Its Pasts raises useful questions about the relationship, or lack thereof, between two disciplines that emerge from philology as it existed at the founding of Modern Philology—literary studies and folklore (more specifically, ballad scholarship). Atkinson begins by setting forth the book’s dual aim of considering “the past of the ballad and the past in the ballad” (ix). By “the past of the ballad,” he means both the broader history of ballads as they circulate in the English-speaking world, primarily England and Scotland, and the literary histories formed by collecting ballads by antiquarians, folklorists, and others from the mid-seventeenth century to the present. By “the past in the ballad,” he means how ballads themselves represent history—for instance, the sinking of the Ramilies in 1760 or the murder of Samuel Nelme by his grandson in 1847.In chapter 1, Atkinson lays the groundwork for both versions of the past by taking a hard look at the predisposition in ballad studies and ballads themselves toward continuity. While many ballads are indeed remarkably durable, an honest appraisal of the evidence requires that these continuities not be overstated, as they have been by prominent ballad scholars like Cecil Sharp and A. L. Lloyd. Rather than positing an unbroken chain from past to present that the evidence will not bear, Atkinson instead argues for continuity through “ballad weight” and “re-presentation” (20–28). “Ballad weight,” Atkinson’s own coinage, registers “the cumulative effect of ballads, as printed, as collected, as performed,” a definition that significantly refuses folklore’s typical privileging of oral over printed instances. The total weight of these instances points to the effect ballads have on “the implicit memory” of the communities where the ballads appear (20–21). If “ballad weight” evidences past encounters with a particular ballad, the encounters themselves are characterized by “re-presentation.” Drawn from Edmund Hussel’s phenomenology, it describes how ballads “re-present” the past for those who write, perform, read, or listen to them, “not primarily for mimesis but for phenomenal experience” gained through the constructive force of storytelling (26–27).The rest of the first half of the book elaborates upon Atkinson’s claims for “the past of the ballad.” In chapter 2, Atkinson finds that claims for the medieval roots of the ballad must be heavily qualified. While there are nearly thirty texts extant in manuscript or print prior to 1600, this represents a very small percentage of what we call ballads, and ballads that scholars have claimed to have medieval origins often lack textual evidence of such antiquity. It turns out that the medieval origins attributed to ballads are largely the artifact of what Albert Friedman many decades ago ironically called the Ballad Revival, which Atkinson traces to Thomas Percy’s mid-seventeenth-century Folio MS and which picks up speed and cultural authority in the antiquarian curation of the ballad by Joseph Addison, Percy, Thomas Warton, and others, committed to constructing a continuous literary history from medieval minstrelsy to the present (48–64). A related strain of literary history—the Gothic—is featured in chapter 3. There, Atkinson finds a wellspring of Gothic balladry not in anonymous tales of folk superstition but rather David Mallet’s “William and Margaret.” Tracing the ballad through a dizzying array of instances and analogues, Atkinson makes the case that the textual record gives us no way of definitively separating Mallet’s “literary” ballad from the more “traditional” version of the story (“Fair Margaret and Sweet William”) favored by Francis James Child in his canonical English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98). Mallet’s ballad seems to carry weight for both Matthew (“Monk”) Lewis’s influential if controversial Gothic stylings and the mass of broadsides circulating in the streets of England and Scotland (100). The difficulty in separating the literary from the traditional carries through in chapter 4, where Atkinson considers Michael Bruce’s 1760s poem “Sir James the Rose.” Although Child prefers another balladic telling of Sir James because it is not tied to an individual author, Atkinson shows that Child’s favored version has no demonstrable origins earlier than the eighteenth century; and, conversely, Bruce’s song, though stigmatized as a mere imitation ballad, has more weight in popular as well as elite venues, and is repeatedly collected from oral recitation “in north-east Scotland in early decades of the twentieth century” (129).Atkinson then turns to the past in the ballad, and it is here that “re-presentation” comes to the fore. In chapter 5, he looks at ballads about shipwrecks, one for which there appears to be a clear historical source, the wreck of the Ramilies, and another that has no clear antecedent, the maritime catastrophe narrated in that most famous of ballads, “Sir Patrick Spens.” But, in the end, “historical accuracy is largely beside the point,” for what ballads do is encode “the idea of a memory.” This sense of pastness, the value of something that came before not dependent upon unbroken continuity with the past, gives the ballad its “backward-looking tendency” (158). The final chapter considers a more specific way that ballads think about history; by looking at a range of murder ballads, Atkinson discerns an uneven movement away from Providence as a force in detection and punishment once we reach the Victorian era. But a providential strain remains, a blend of continuity and discontinuity that attests to the backward-facing predisposition of ballads.The Ballad and Its Pasts has many virtues. Ballad scholars harboring any ungrounded preconceptions about balladic continuity will have them challenged by someone who has spent a lifetime thinking deeply and productively about ballads. That same sure-footedness means that literary scholars who are interested in ballads but who might feel overwhelmed by the multifarious streams of manuscripts, broadsides, and records of recitations will gain much knowledge about the ballad archive that could aid them in their own research. Both ballad and literary scholars will have their understanding of how ballads encode the past enriched. Throughout, Atkinson is scrupulous about what claims his evidence will bear; he knows the archive is far from neat, and his prudence makes his ambitious claims about the ballad more persuasive.But he is less thorough and less helpful when it comes to the literary histories he invokes. While he cites key and current sources in many cases—for instance, Nick Groom on Percy and Paula MacDowell on ideas of orality—he is prone to reductive claims about literature and literary history that scant more current scholarship. This is true of his cursory nod toward literary influence (103) and in the absence of scholarship on Allan Ramsay more recent than 1987, which would have added nuance to his discussion of Ramsay’s (and Mallet’s) audiences. But the book’s literary-historical gaps are most evident in its treatment of Romanticism. In his discussion of Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s treatment of “Sir Patrick Spens,” Atkinson notes that “this is not an essay on Romantic poetry” (149). Fair enough. But if balladry, not Romanticism, is the book’s central concern, there is no getting around the importance of Romanticism to our ideas of the ballad, and more attention to the field’s more recent findings and debates would have been useful. Literary scholars will not find the scandal of balladic discontinuity scandalous because the last few decades of work in Romanticism and the long eighteenth century more broadly has so thoroughly exposed the wishfulness of the continuities that Romantic authors tried to conjure as well as their self-consciousness about these gaps. This understanding is now familiar enough to have filtered down to Brit Lit anthologies; for instance, the ninth edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2012) begins its volume on the Romantic period with “Balladry and Ballad Revivals,” having shifted ballads from the medieval volume to the eighteenth century in the prior edition. There, the editors recognize that despite the claims by Percy and others for the ballad as medieval, “scholars nowadays place the origin of much of the ballad canon later, from the seventeenth century on” and that they have placed ballads in the Romantic era to “acknowledge how generative balladry was for Romantic poetics.”1When Atkinson directly engages with Romanticism, other problems emerge. For instance: “Indeed, imitation was regarded prior to the Romantic period as an entirely respectable literary practice” (127). But as Robert Griffin and others have argued, a simple opposition between Romanticism and imitation is not supportable.2 Atkinson himself goes on to acknowledge, “Walter Scott did not hesitate to include a section of ‘Imitations of the Ancient Ballad’ in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border” (128), and there is no credible account of British Romanticism that does not include Scott. At another point, we do get a definition of sorts of Romanticism:“William and Margaret” can be cast as an influential literary precursor, an example avant la lettre, as Saintsbury would have it, of the style and substance of the “true romantic poetry” of the later eighteenth century. Saintsbury did not say exactly what he meant (and in any case Romanticism certainly cannot be defined by any single set of criteria), but it is possible to identify in “William and Margaret” an uninhibited expression of strong emotion and rejection of self-restraint, a free play of the imagination and invocation of heightened terror, conveyed with a directness of diction indebted to the ballad mode, which together invite a description such as “proto-Romantic.” (91)While Romanticism is difficult to define and while “William and Margaret” may have influenced poetry to come, this list of anticipatory Romantic characteristics glosses over the discontinuities that literary historians in general and Romanticists in particular have long insisted upon as a guard against simplifying teleologies. Throughout Atkinson’s discussions of literary history and especially Romanticism, one feels the absence of insights by Susan Stewart and especially by Maureen McLane, who make use of literary and media theory as well as folklore to unpack the complex desires behind and practices of the Ballad Revival.3 As McLane puts it, “Through minstrelsy, poets” from 1800 on built on the work of eighteenth-century antiquarians to “explor[e] problems of poetic and cultural authority as well as a history of poetic forms,” including the overlay of orality and print and the challenges posed to “culture-workers in a commercialized literary era.”4 From this perspective, “Romantic poetry” is “minstrelsy,” and McLane clinches this with a reading of “The Three Ravens”/“The Twa Corbies” in light of the editorial practices of Scott and Child and its dissemination in the United Kingdom and North America.5The split within philology between ballad and literary studies is an old one. The first volume of Modern Philology (1903–4) gave space in three of its four issues to Francis B. Gummere’s vehement defense of his claim that authentic traditional ballads have their roots in the communal composition of primitive societies; the fourth issue included J. E. Spingarn’s critique of Saintsbury’s A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day (1900–1902) for ignoring “those elements of progress in critical studies achieved by modern scholarship” that could explain, for instance, the rise at the end of the eighteenth century of “internal or psychological tests” over “external rules.”6 But Gummere is interested in “the literary” only to contrast its supposed individualism with the communal world of true balladry; Spingarn, concentrating on the elite reaches of literary criticism and theory, betrays no interest in the ballad or any other artifact of folk or popular culture. It would be opportunistic and inaccurate to use Atkinson’s citation of Saintsbury to accuse him of simply ignoring modern scholarship in literary studies as Spingarn accuses Saintsbury. But this moment from deep in our disciplinary pasts suggests that while The Ballad and Its Pasts goes some way toward bringing these two fields into productive dialogue, it misses opportunities to further and deepen the discussion, echoing a century in which these two strains of modern philology too often talk past each other.7Notes1. Deidre Shauna Lynch and Jack Stillinger, “Balladry and Ballad Revivals,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period—Volume D, 9th ed., ed. Lynch and Stillinger (New York: Norton, 2012), 31.2. See Robert Griffin, Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study in Historiography (Cambridge University Press, 1995).3. Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Oxford University Press, 1991); Maureen McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of Romantic Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2008).4. McLane, Balladeering, 144.5. Ibid., 258–70.6. Francis B. Gummere, “Primitive Poetry and the Ballad. I,” Modern Philology 1 (1903): 193–202, “Primitive Poetry and the Ballad. II,” Modern Philology 1 (1903): 217–34, and “Primitive Poetry and the Ballad. III,” Modern Philology 1 (1904): 373–90. J. E. Spingarn, “The Origins of Modern Criticism,” Modern Philology 1 (1904): 477–96, quotation on 482.7. For one recent attempt to further this dialogue, see Joseph Harris and Barbara Hillers, eds., Child’s Chidren: Ballad Study and Its Legacies (WVT, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2012). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 117, Number 1August 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/703745HistoryPublished online May 16, 2019 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.