The Printed Record of an Oral Tradition: Anna Gordon Brown's Ballads
Traditional ballads—those sung narratives whose origins are uncertain and whose authorship is unknown—have been difficult for literary scholars to account for and to analyze. Anonymous folk songs, they have moved between oral tradition and printed versions in broadsides or chapbooks and back aga...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
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University of South Carolina Press
2013
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/78292 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6298-3896 |
| Summary: | Traditional ballads—those sung narratives whose origins are uncertain
and whose authorship is unknown—have been difficult for literary
scholars to account for and to analyze. Anonymous folk songs, they have
moved between oral tradition and printed versions in broadsides or
chapbooks and back again over the course of many centuries. They rarely
have a single definitive text but can be found in many variants, making
textual analysis tricky. Most scholars who have studied ballads are either
medievalists—when the ballads are thought to have originated—or
eighteenth-century scholars—the century when ballads were first
collected. Francis J. Child, Harvard’s first professor of vernacular
literature in English, was both. He thought of ballads as our “earliest
known poetry,” whose “historical and natural place is anterior to the
appearance of the poetry of art”; and he collected as many of them as he
could with all their rich variations in the late nineteenth century. |
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