17348

WiSe 14/15: V-Ballads and Popular Romance

Neil Cartlidge

Comments

The term ballad is very rich in connotation. At one level, it suggests a distinct kind of stylistics: the highly economical, evocative and melodramatic forms of expression characteristic of ballad as a form of narration. At another, it evokes a particular landscape, the north of England and its borders with Scotland. Many of the traditional ballads that survive are explicitly connected with this region, and they often reflect its longstanding political and social instability, its very specific local feuds and rivalries, and also a strong sense of a "Borders" identity outweighing any sense of Englishness or Scottishness. The ballads can also be seen as romances-in-miniature; and they share many themes and motifs with late medieval and early modern "popular" romance. A particularly interesting case in point is the Robin Hood tradition, in which ballads and romances are closely related. This tradition is generally located further south than the Borders ballads, though it shares their interest in outlawry and feud. Another illustration of the close relationship between ballads and romances is the seventeenth-century manuscript known as the Percy folio, which contains a mixture of ballads and medieval texts (including sometimes unique copies of material going back to the fifteenth century). This module addresses all of these traditions, as well as the gradual rediscovery and/or recording of such material in the nineteenth-century. Course-books: ballads: please read as many ballads as you can, e.g. in one of the following anthologies: The Oxford Book of Ballads, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford, 1969; repr. 1982) - now out of print but often available second-hand]; Border Ballads: A Selection, ed. James Reed (Manchester, 1991: repr. 2003); F.J. Child's corpus of ballads can be found online: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Child's_Ballads Robin Hood: Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamazoo, 2000) - not necessary to buy: freely available online at: http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/knightol.htm "popular" romance: Suggested background reading: Brown, Mary Ellen, Child's Unfinished Masterpiece: The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Urbana, 2011) Bruce, Mark P., and Katherine Terrell, The Anglo-Scottish Border and the Shaping of Identity 1300-1600 (New York, 2012): esp. Richard Firth Green, 'The Border Strikes Back', pp. 103-119 Fowler, David C., A Literary History of the Popular Ballad (Durham NC, 1968) Fraser, George MacDonald, The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers (London, 1971) Johnston, Arthur, Enchanted Ground: Study of Mediaeval Romance in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1964) Simons, John, ed. Guy of Warwick and Other Chapbook Romances (Liverpool, 1998) …and from The Guardian (8th February 2013): http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/feb/08/anais-mitchell-album-child-ballads close

16 Class schedule

Regular appointments

Thu, 12:00 - 14:00 16 Class schedule

Thu, 2014-10-16 12:00 - 14:00

Lecturers:
Prof. Neil Cartlidge