Collection Of Ballads Research Articles

The Travels of ‘John Anderson, my jo’

Far from being a lament or lamentation in any conventional sense of the genre, the song 'John Anderson, my jo' is-certainly in Robert Burns' sanitised version-a homage to enduring love. The words of the female protagonist, however, also betray a palpable sense of shared personal loss (a perspective also common to lament), although what it is that is lost changes between iterations. An earlier, bawdy version focuses on the loss of youth with special attention to the accompanying loss of sexual function, whereas in Burns' poem this has been reduced to lost youth alone. Nonetheless, the underlying theme of loss remains constant. The plaintive and lamenting character of the melody created by its minor mode and slow tempo affectively support the character of loss.In this article I will examine how this underlying sense of lament informs the many political appropriations and parodies that were made of this song, focusing on its travels out to the colonies of settlement. These colonies, when taken together, have become known as the British world, a world constituted by a sense of shared British identity and culture.21 will demonstrate how the sense of loss, together with the affective qualities of the melody, was appropriated and reframed within the arena of radical politics across the nineteenthcentury British world and identify the particular ways political appropriations transformed the poignant sense of loss into one of rebuke and complaint. By tracking various printed forms and performances of this song from Britain to Australia, New Zealand and Canada, this article will reveal a shared culture of political radicalism and popular song. The article will also highlight how in the political parodies of 'John Anderson, my jo', the personal and intimate become the political and public. Moreover, these versions demonstrate how the malleability of popular song provides a means of expressing local inflections within a shared inter-colonial culture. I will also consider the role of songs such as this in the formation of diasporic cultures and music's important part in sustaining the memory of home for the thousands who forsook kith and kin and, either willingly or not, participated in the waves of nineteenth-century emigration from Britain.This research on 'John Anderson, my jo' takes its place as part of a broader project that is inherently interdisciplinary and centres upon the role of music, in particular song and singing practices, in the spread of radical political culture across the British world. As such it throws up questions about the disciplinary forms, methods and objectives of history and musicology. Whereas music has often held a marginal position in historical studies-in great part because of the specialist requirements of musical literacy and musical analysis-history has always been integral to mainstream musicology. Its primary uses, however, have been to cast light upon and bring greater understanding to a particular work of music-to provide a musical work its cultural context. Here, however, the direction is reversed; here music is used to cast light upon, and provide alternative dimensions of, history. My argument is thus twofold: that a tune functions as a vehicle of transmission that can cover vast distances, both temporally and geographically, and that songs themselves are at one and the same time agents and vessels of history, shaping it and containing it.The eighteenth century saw into being on the one hand Enlightenment ideas such as rationalism and empiricism and on the other the rise of literary antiquarianism and the 'eighteenth-century British ballad revival'.3 This was the time of not only the philosophical theorising of John Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith, but also the antiquarian ballad collecting of individuals such as Thomas Percy, Joseph Ritson and James Johnson. Multiple versions and variants of 'John Anderson, my jo' in both textual and musical forms are found in ballad collections from this period. …

Fernán Caballero, pionera en la recolección del romancero de tradición oral moderna (Fernan Caballero, a Pioneer in the Collection of Ballads of Modern oral Tradition)

Cecilia Böhl Faber, "Fernán Caballero", is a pioneer in the collection of traditional ballads through Andalusia in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Through his writings customs, the novelist presents a repertoire of ballads and folk songs that will be of great importance for the further study of Andalusian folklore.

The Politics of Translation in Francis Sylvester Mahony's “The Rogueries of Thomas Moore”

This article re-examines the satirical writings of the Irish wit, essayist and journalist, Francis Sylvester Mahony (1804–1866) (“Father Prout”), who in the 1830s authored a series of comic articles for the conservative London periodical, Fraser's Magazine. It focuses on his best-known essay, “The Rogueries of Thomas Moore” (1834), which provides an ironic commentary on the politicization of historical debate in post-Emancipation Ireland. The article looks afresh at his nuanced critique of the patriotic verse of Thomas Moore (1779–1852). The concept of “original translation,” or translation as “transformation,” is explored in relation to Mahony's supposed discovery of foreign-language precursors to Moore's nationalist ballad collection, the Irish Melodies. In addition, the article explores Mahony's parodic upending of Moore's efforts to recreate an authentic Gaelic past in his English-language poetry, as well as Mahony's subtle critique of the role played by translation in the politicized rewriting of Irish history. It also uses critical theory to examine Mahony's ironic conception of textual transformation in his reworked ballads, resituating his comic re-assessment of Moore's poetry in the broader context of the emergence of a post-Romantic literature in 1830s Ireland.

<em>Child's Unfinished Masterpiece:</em> The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, by Mary Ellen Brown

Reviewed by: Child’s Unfinished Masterpiece: The English and Scottish Popular Ballads David Atkinson (bio) Child’s Unfinished Masterpiece: The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, by Mary Ellen Brown; pp. xi + 283. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011, $45.00, £29.99. This admirable and very human book is an account of the genesis and production of Francis James Child’s edition of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98), which remains to this day the standard edition of English-language ballads, to such an extent that they are generally referred to as the “Child ballads.” Precisely what constitutes one of these ballads, however, was never entirely clear even to Child himself and has remained a subject of debate ever since. It is one of the merits of Mary Ellen Brown’s book that she considers this state of affairs chronologically and empirically without making it into a point of contention. Child was educated at Harvard College and to all intents and purposes remained there for the rest of his life, becoming successively Professor of Rhetoric and [End Page 541] Oratory, Professor of Literature, and Professor of English. By 1853 he had taken on the general editorship of a multi-volume series of British Poets, which was to include volumes of ballads that he himself would edit. This would be the first time the ballads had been presented as part of the canon of English literature. These volumes were based on ballad collections already in print. Child, however, wanted to make a significant contribution to scholarly knowledge; he was inspired by Svend Grundtvig, the Danish editor of Danmarks gamle Folkeviser, to undertake an entirely new ballad project which would go beyond the published collections to the underlying manuscripts, thus neatly combining philological integrity with a belief in ballads as early literature. This is what was to become The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Brown’s method is largely to let Child tell his own story by quoting extensively from swathes of archival material held at Harvard and elsewhere. Child’s project was to a significant degree an epistolary one, conducted by correspondence with scholars and other specialists in England, Scotland, elsewhere in Europe, and America, and the sources are correspondingly rich. But there are family sources as well, and the initial section of the book is biographical. This is important because Popular Ballads was the work of a Victorian scholar working under peculiarly nineteenth-century conditions. Child himself endured poor health, and his wife suffered from one of those unidentified Victorian afflictions which made her an invalid for life. Child’s evident distaste for the more bawdy ballads, which led to their being excluded from Popular Ballads, was again a direct product of his social environment. Yet at the same time, the nineteenth-century scholarly environment permitted him to undertake a lifetime’s project that has endured to the present day, something unimaginable in the academic environment of the twenty-first century. The book then charts the progress of Popular Ballads, followed by more detailed presentation of some of the most important of the epistolary relationships, especially with the Scottish ballad specialist William Macmath, who appointed himself Child’s unofficial, and largely unpaid, co-editor. It is particularly enlightening to see Child’s ballad concept emerge and change from a philological belief in the primacy of old manuscripts to an assumption of the primacy of memory, always with an uneasy distrust of print. In the final chapter Brown revisits this concept: a fundamentally devolutionary view whereby ballads had arisen among a homogeneous people prior to book culture; as society changed they became the possession of the “unlettered,” who unwittingly changed them while preserving elements of their original integrity (233). It is a confusing (and historically nonsensical) concept, with which Child grappled throughout his scholarly life and which continues to challenge ballad scholars. Brown elicits from the material evidence four qualities that Child used as guidelines in selecting the ballads: age, initial wholeness, traditionality, and mutability. Brown draws very sparingly on secondary sources, although they are well represented in a substantial bibliography. This might come as a surprise at first, but as one reads on, the merits of...

The Death of the Duke of Gandía: Historical Memory and Invention in a Judeo-Spanish Ballad

La muerte del duque de Gandía is a late romance noticiero , which recounts events surrounding the assassination of Juan Borja (Giovanni Borgia) in Rome in 1497. During the sixteenth century, this romance appeared in printed ballad collections and circulated in chapbooks. Eventually, it became part of the Judeo-Spanish oral tradition, in which it is called El pexkador . Between 1890 and 1973, numerous versions were collected in Sephardic communities around the Mediterranean and in the United States. This article poses two questions: 1) When a historical narrative underlies the story being told by a ballad, how faithful does the oral tradition remain in its memory of those events? 2) As the historical events become increasingly distant in space and time, how do the forces of invention operate on these texts? The sixteenth-century text is anti-Borgia in sentiment; it suggests the involvement of other family members in the murder. In the modern oral texts, the political message disappears. Some elements of the well-documented historical event are conserved while others are transformed so that the story recounted continues to be meaningful to the communities that sing/recite the ballad.

Steve Newman, Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New CriticismBallad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism. Steve Newman . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. 294.

<i>Steve Newman,</i> Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism<i>Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism</i>. Steve Newman . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. 294.

The Glenbuchat Ballads , and: Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism (review)

The Glenbuchat Ballads , and: Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism (review)

Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism by Steve Newman

Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism by Steve Newman

La chanson de colportage anglaise, 1689-1764: relique ou renaissance ?

The street ballad remained one of the main vectors of dissemination of the written word among the “ common people” in England from the late 16th to the mid-19thcentury. Recently, online access to many digitized 18th century ballad collections has highlighted how dynamic and resilient the genre proved at a time when the so-called “ traditional” ballad was entering the cultural mainstream thanks to the likes of John Gay and Thomas Percy. A comparative study of the catalogues of two of London’s main ballad printers and publishers, William Thackeray and Cluer Dicey, issued respectively in1689 and 1764, enables trends in street ballad production to be identified, highlighting the fundamental conservatism of the genre but also clear thematic changes and the growing importance of the ballad text at the expense of tune and illustrations.

Toponymy of the Child Ballads: Problems of Representation in Written and Oral Texts

Place names in ballads range from the real and historical—London, Edinburgh, Aberdeen—through to the patently fictional—Ambertown, Archerdale, Scarlet Town, Roch Royal. In between these two poles lies a range of names that might refer to real places but equally might shade off into the imaginative. In terms of ballad narrative this rarely poses a problem; however, for the ballad collector/editor, such names may pose a real challenge of representation. The functions of ballad texts in writing are not the same as those of ballads in performance. The phonetics of a place name when sung or recited may not always usefully translate into its written representation. Is there any merit in writing “Edinborough,” even if the word is pronounced as a tetrasyllable? An editor is often required to make decisions about the orthography of a name—decisions that might seem much less compelling to a listener than to a reader. This paper traces some of the questions raised in particular by place names in the ballad collection made by James Madison Carpenter, and considers their implications for editorial strategies and for the referentiality of place names in ballads at large.

Fingierter Mythos, gefälschter Kommentar: Techniken der Simulation in Prosper Mérimées „La Guzla“

The present article examines Prosper Merimee's 'La Guzla', a collection of ballads published in 1827, in the context of myth and fabrication of literary constructions of People and Nation in the 18th and 19th century. It elicits this work's strategies of fiction, which ― systematically disposed and subtly arranged on different layers of the text ― disclose Merimee's mystification of Croatian and Serbian folktales as a 'fake', as a feigned myth. From this perspective the 'mistakes', by means of which in the course of time literary criticism thought to unmask the mystification as deficient, turn out to be not 'shortcomings' but rather a well calculated technique: they reveal the strategies of creating a 'fictive myth' by means of which Merimee criticises the poetics of production and reception of his time.

Opposing the Medical World: The Poetry of Anne Home Hunter

Previous articleNext article No AccessOpposing the Medical World: The Poetry of Anne Home HunterJudith Bailey SlagleJudith Bailey Slagle Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 39, Number 3Summer 2008 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24045758 Views: 1Total views on this site © 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Ukrainian Ballads in Canada: Adjusting to New Life in a New Land

Folklore is the artistic expression of belief. The various forms of folklore change and adapt to reflect changing circumstances and changing views of the world. When Ukrainians came to Canada, they brought their folklore, ballads included, with them. In the new land, ballads helped voice the struggles of the Ukrainian Pioneers. Examining a collection of ballads made approximately sixty years after Ukrainians began arriving on the Prairies shows that the ballads performed in Canada spoke of real problems, problems attested in both folk sources and historical records. These include the physical hardship of life on an acreage, male absence as they went to work on the railroad, and the tension between women and their daughters-in-laws, who were left to struggle on their own. Ukrainian girls attracted to non-Ukrainians were seen as problematic, as were men seeking solace in alcohol and infidelity. And there were many other Canadian issues for which traditional ballads provided a powerful means of expression. The ballad tradition was modified through selection, i.e., only relevant songs continued to be performed. It was also changed internally and individual ballad texts were altered by the addition of new terminology and new ideas. This is especially true when attitudes in Canada differed from those in Ukraine. A very important change in attitude applies to magic. While the use of magic is treated ambiguously in ballads performed in Ukraine, it is routinely condemned in those performed in Canada.

Ballad collection, lyric, and the canon: the call of the popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism

Reviewed Medium: book Authors: Steve Newman Year: 2007 Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 978-0-8122-4009-2 (hard cover). Prices: $65.00 USD(hard cover).

STEVE NEWMAN. Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism.

STEVE NEWMAN. Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism.

Romanceiro tradicional das Ilhas dos Açores: 1 Corvo e Flores (review)

Reviewed by Bonnie D. Irwin Eastern Illinois University Romanceiro tradicional das Ilhas dos Açores: 1 Corvo e Flores (Traditional Ballads of the Azores: Volume 1, Corvo and Flores). By Joanne B. Purcell. (Lisbon: Angra do Heroísmo, 2002. Pp. 247, preface, 3 photographs, 2 maps, 6 indices, glossary.) The late Joanne Purcell spent much of 1969 and 1970 documenting the rich oral traditions of the Azores, and the first volume of her ballad research on the islands of Corvo and Flores has recently been published under the auspices of the Azorean Secretary of Education and Culture. Thirty-three texts are presented, generously cross-referenced with other variants collected from the Luso-Iberian ballad tradition. The volume also includes musical transcriptions [End Page 502] and indices of informants, terminology, and first lines. Romanceiro tradicional das Ilhas dos Açores represents just a small sampling of the over one thousand variants of seventy ballads collected by Purcell during her field research in the nine islands of the Azores. This research contributes richly to both Iberian and European ballad studies, as Purcell herself acknowledged: "Como os Açores são uma zona muito conservadora devido ao seu isolamento e localização na periferia da Europa, a minha colecção fornece elementos indispensáveis para um melhor conhecimento do romanceiro português, e de grande utilidade para os estudos comparativos do romanceiro pan-ibérico e pan-europeu" (p. 30). (Because the Azores are a very conservative zone, due to their isolation and location at the periphery of Europe, my collection will provide indispensable elements for a greater understanding of Portuguese balladry and will be greatly useful for comparative study of pan-Iberian and pan-European balladry.) Indeed, one sees in this small selection of Purcell's fieldwork Carolingian ballads ("Conde Claros ea Princesa," "Conde Claros Vestido de Frade"), historic ballads ("Morte do Príncipe D. Afonso," "Batalha de Lepanto"), classic ballads ("Florbela e Brancaflor"), captive ballads ("A Irmã Perdida," "O Cativo," "O Conde Arnaldos"), and a wide variety of domestic ballads of love, seduction, and betrayal. The editors have used Joanne Purcell's 1970 article, "A Riqueza do Romanceiro e Outras Tradições Orais nas Ilhas dos Açores" (Atlântida 14: 223–52, 1970), as an introduction to the volume. In it, Purcell cogently writes of her fieldwork experience, the wide range of ballads she collected, and the other oral traditions she collected along with the ballads. These latter samples include some 450–500 traditional stories, told mostly by men, as well as tongue twisters, popular theatre performances, legends, riddles, and proverbs. Of particular interest to Purcell were her interviews with whale hunters, who used a terminology borrowed from nineteenth-century English-speaking whalers from New England. In discussing her informants, Purcell notes that storytelling was far more popular among men, who had longer periods of time to perform narratives while on night fishing runs or on rainy days when they were not working. Women greatly preferred ballads, which they sang while involved in domestic activities ranging from washing dishes to weaving to kneading bread dough. Despite the conservative environment of the Azores that protected many of these oral traditions, Purcell recognized their fragility; she located one ninety-two-year-old informant the night before the woman was to leave for the United States. Modern culture and emigration were depleting the pool of informants thirty years ago, when Purcell was conducting her fieldwork. Today, we might reasonably assume the oral traditions have further deteriorated, leading us to await eagerly the publication of more of this valuable collection. With Joanne Purcell's death in 1984, however, we are dependent upon the goodwill and talents of those scholars who have survived her to publish these texts. Joanne Purcell's collection of traditional ballads of the Azores represents the best in scholarly folklore works, not only in that it is a comprehensive and well-researched collection, but also in that several folklorists and other...

Cuckolds all a row: Broadside ballads: songs from the streets, taverns, theatres and countryside of 17th-century England, ed. Lucie Skeaping, foreword by Andrew Motion (London: Faber Music, 2005), 19.95

‘I love a ballad in print’ says the shepherdess Mopsa in Shakespeare's The winter's tale; she is referring to broadside ballads sold by the pedlar Autolycus. Illus.1, though from later in the 17th century, shows the format of most ballad sheets. Beneath the title comes a summary of the story or theme, the name of the tune for singing the ballad, one or more woodcuts (sometimes, as in this case, bearing a tangential relation to the topic), and the ballad itself, printed in gothic type and usually of many verses. Ballads were for singing, but the absence of music on the broadsides has meant that most collected editions, from A collection of old ballads (1723) onwards, have been compiled from a literary perspective and print the texts without music. Lucie Skeaping's Broadside ballads is the first anthology devoted to 17th-century ballads that includes tunes (supported by chord symbols) and texts.

"The purest english": Ballads and the English Literary Dialect

Sir, ballad-singer is higher man, for he does two things; he repeats and he sings: there is both recitation and musick in his performance.... --Samuel Johnson (1) Despite often being described as sister arts in the eighteenth century, the intimate relationship between poetry and music has been neglected by recent criticism in favor of text-based theories of interpretation. This paper investigates how noise defined the aesthetics of Englishness at the end of the eighteenth century and for the Romantic period, suggesting that is possible to trace sound patterns in literature and in prints, and thereby to reconstruct certain soundscapes. Although the following account is itself profoundly text-based, does attempt to consider how sounds, whether musical settings or background noise, can be articulated in literature, and how this noise may echo changing social conditions. My interpretation is underpinned by the poetics of Richard Shusterman, as elaborated for literary criticism by Ralph Pordzik. Pordzik's approach calls for an examination of the situational embedment of text: how literature functions as experience. (2) This is not merely investigating how literature affects our emotions, but is a method of recapturing dimension of the written text that appeals to our sense of more fully realized, sensual experience instead of our intellectual or analytical abilities. (3) Neopragmatist reading is not paraphrasing; it should be seen as literary practice that tries to be more adequate, more true, to the text's sensual import, one that brings us closer to achieving an internally more integrative experience of reading as 'collaboration' with the text. (4) For the purposes of the present paper, neo-pragmatist reading stresses the harmonic expectations of eighteenth-century readers confronted with ballad or song text, and argues that acoustic references in verse should not simply be considered as metaphorical, but as the traces of lost (and irrecoverable) physical reality. (5) Literature is, in other words, secret history of noise. Lines may allude to the voice and music, the natural sounds of birdsong, wind, and rain, the insistent hubbub of the city, and so forth. All of these sorts of sounds can be emphasized with acoustic effects such as alliteration, assonance, and rhyme, but there is also in writing secondary noise, like background ambience, which carries sounds more covertly or implicitly. This is almost inaudible to readers today, but would have been more noticeable to contemporaries. Popular folk melodies such as Packington's Pound or Derry Down, street cries, and even the unearthly strains of the Aeolian harp may no longer be familiar sounds today, but they were part of the phonic world of the eighteenth century. (6) They were not metaphorical sounds but actual experiences, and hence they whisper through the poetry of the period. I shall confine my discussion to one work: Thomas Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (popularly known as Percy's first published in 1765). My argument proposes that in eighteenth-century collections of old and in particular in Reliques, textual sound effects are deployed in order to exemplify an emerging English identity, and that this subsequently influenced the antiquarian editing of later ballad collections and the composition of verse. These activities also attempted to distance the English tradition from political balladeering and the rude sounds of rioting. The Reliques is collection of ballads, songs, romances, and historical poetry, liberally seasoned with literary-antiquarian annotation: there are traditional ballads, songs from Shakespeare, translations from the Moorish, Scottish songs, as well as popular and political verses from British history. Many of the pieces purportedly derived from folio MS, the seventeenth-century commonplace book he had famously rescued from being used as firelighter, but he also drew on many printed sources, including Thomas D'Urfey's Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719-20) and the 1723 Collection of Old Ballads, as well as archives such as the Pepys Library and his own collection of contemporary broadsides. …

Brother Trouble: Incest Ballads of the British Isles

Brother Trouble: Incest Ballads of the British Isles Ruth Perry Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ballads are a great unsung body of texts that hover on the margins of eighteenth-century literary history without quite being acknowledged by modern scholars of the period. But ballads were a crucial cultural phenomenon in eighteenth-century society, a common experience of rich and poor, so embedded in the soundscape as not to be remarked, any more than the air people breathed. Joseph Addison famously wrote about ballads in three Spectator papers of 1711 (nos. 70, 74, 85), praising the beauties of "The Ballad of Chevy Chase" and "Babes in the Wood." He said: "an ordinary Song or Ballad that is the Delight of the common People, cannot fail to please all such Readers as are not unqualified for the Entertainment by their Affectation or Ignorance" (no. 70). Addison cautioned his audience not to let the ballad's simplicity of style prejudice them against its "true poetical Spirit" or its passionate and beautiful sentiments. He cites the example of the "late Lord Dorset," a man with "the greatest Wit tempered with the greatest Candour . . . one of the finest Criticks as well as the best Poets of his Age" who "had a numerous Collection of old English Ballads, and took a particular Pleasure in Reading of them" (no. 74). Ballads were many people's first literary experience in eighteenth-century England and Scotland, whether simple broadsides from which they learned to read or the earliest sung stories that moved them to tears or ignited their imaginations. Oliver Goldsmith loved ballads, and several find their way into The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). He wrote in his essay "Happiness" (1759), "The music of Mattei" (the Neopolitan singer La Colonna1 ) "is dissonance to what I felt when our old dairymaid sung me into tears with 'Johnny Armstrong's Last Good Night,' or the cruelty of 'Barbara Allen.'"2 When Clara Reeve wrote her radical history of the novel, The Progress of Romance (1785), tracing the novel's sources and influences, she insists that the romances—the closest proximate prior prose narrative form—came from earlier ballads. Her intellectual heroine, Euphrasia, quotes Thomas Percy's essay [End Page 289] "On the Ancient Metrical Romances," prefixed to the third volume of his Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765), to the effect that romances "may be derived in a lineal descent from the ancient Historical songs of the Gothic bards and scalds" (33).3 Percy's Reliques was the first literary collection of ballads in England and deeply influenced a generation of poets, including Coleridge and Wordsworth, who, significantly, named their first collection Lyrical Ballads. Thus the rediscovery of ballads as a powerful literary form can be said to have changed the course of literary history. Ballads were more present in eighteenth-century England than literary critics and historians tend to remember. We are so used to making our way in the world with our eyes that we forget what Walter Ong calls the "lifeworld of the oral/aural past"4 —an environment, in the city at least, of street cries and rhymes, bells ringing and chants, work songs and lullabies—an environment in which rags were sought and strawberries sold to the accompaniment of words and musical phrases so familiar that the hearer did not have to understand the words to recognize which peddler was abroad exercising his or her lungs. Ballads were sung in taverns and camps, in dimly lit laborers' cottages, as well as in the blazing halls of the wealthy; they were memorized and transmitted orally by ordinary people as well as by professional singers and actors. They were printed on broadsides and in chapbooks and garlands, and often circulated from print to oral transmission and back again. A ballad might be learned by ear and then written down to save or to remember; or it might be learned from a broadside, remembered, and then passed along orally. From the earliest dawn of...

Regionalizam ili jezična integracija nacionalne samosvijesti

In 1936 Krleža raised the Kajkaviandialect of Croatian to the standard language of national literature. It did not happen without precedents. In 1914 Fran Galovic published his collection of poems with the title Z mojih bregov in the same dialect. From 1929 onwards several Dalmatian and Istrian poets rehabilited the Kajkaviandialect. Among the authors of the most significant volumes of poetry we find Mate Balota, Drago Gervais, Pero Ljubic and Marin Franicevic. The reestablishment of dialectical poetry was a straightway protest against the Serbianization of the previous standard Croatian language of literature called the Štokaviandialect. Krleža came to know the Zagreb as well as the Varasd variant of the Kajkavian(he heard the latter from his grandmother) as early as a child. While he was making preparations for the writing of his ballads, he enriched his knowledge of the Kajkavian. Its text and its supplementary allusions or references clearly signify the influence of Juraj Habdelic, Ivan Belostenec and Andrija Jambrešic. In his volume of poetry Krleža wrote about the fateful tragedy of the Croatian nation. He could only express his feelings by way of conscious linguistic archaization. In the process of rendering the text of his poems archaic the Hungarian poet, Endre Ady set an example for him. Previously, he published two studies on Ady. He underpinned his statements in the studies by translating Ady's poems. The lingusitic solutions in his translation of the Hungarian poet represent Ady's influence. Certain stanzas in his ballads almost paraphrase Ady. The author of the two studies tried to underpin this process of paraphrasing by the linguistic analysis of Ady's poems. Thus he emphasizes the role of Ady's protestantism in the conception of the Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh. His collection of ballads written in the kaj dialect strongly supported the maintenance of Croatian patriotism in the 1930s.