Author : Natascha Würzbach
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 376 pages
File Size : 34,59 MB
Release : 2011-03-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780521177443
Natascha Würzbach's 1981 study of the street ballad was the first to investigate a specific genre of popular literature which had previously been vastly neglected. Attention is focused on the social and cultural conditions which accompanied its development. It is also looked at as a literary form.
Author : Dianne Dugaw
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 27,95 MB
Release : 2015-12-22
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1317357795
Originally published in 1995. This book’s collection of key essays presents a coherent overview of touchstone statements and issues in the study of Anglo-American popular ballad traditions and suggests ways this panoramic view affords us a look at Euro-American scholarship’s questions, concerns and methods. The study of ballads in English began early in the eighteenth century with Joseph Addison’s discussions which marked the onset of an aesthetic and scholarly interest in popular traditions. Therefore the collection begins with him and then chronologically includes scholars whose views mark pivotal moments which taken together tell a story that does not emerge through an examination of the ballads themselves. The book addresses debates in tradition, orality, performance and community as well as national genealogies and connections to contexts. Each selected piece is pre-empted by an introductory section on its importance and relevance.
Author : Katherine Rebecca Larson
Publisher :
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 32,72 MB
Release : 2019
Category : History
ISBN : 019884378X
This volume treats early modern song as a musical and embodied practice and considers the implications of reading song not just as lyric text, but as a musical phenomenon that is the product of the singing body. It draws on a variety of genres, from theatre to psalm translations, sonnets and lyrics, and household drama to courtly masques.
Author : Andrew Taylor
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 31,1 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1903153395
A reconstruction of the life and works of a sixteenth-century minstrel, showing the tradition to be flourishing well into the Tudor period. Richard Sheale, a harper and balladeer from Tamworth, is virtually the only English minstrel whose life story is known to us in any detail. It had been thought that by the sixteenth century minstrels had generally been downgradedto the role of mere jesters. However, through a careful examination of the manuscript which Sheale almost certainly "wrote" (Bodleian Ashmole 48) and other records, the author argues that the oral tradition remained vibrant at this period, contrary to the common idea that print had by this stage destroyed traditional minstrelsy. The author shows that under the patronage of Edward Stanley, earl of Derby, and his son, from one of the most important aristocratic families in England, Sheale recited and collected ballads and travelled to and from London to market them. Amongst his repertoire was the famous Chevy Chase, which Sir Philip Sidney said moved his heart "more than witha trumpet". Sheale also composed his own verse, including a lament on being robbed of 60 on his way to London; the poem is reproduced in this volume. ANDREW TAYLOR lectures in the Department of English, University of Ottawa.
Author : Adam Fox
Publisher : Clarendon Press
Page : 526 pages
File Size : 43,91 MB
Release : 2000-11-09
Category : History
ISBN : 0191542296
This book explores the varied vernacular forms and rich oral traditions which were such a part of popular culture in early modern England. It focuses, in particular, upon dialect speech and proverbial wisdom, "old wives' tales" and children's lore, historical legends and local customs, scurrilous versifying and scandalous rumour-mongering. Adam Fox argues that while the spoken word provides the most vivid insight into the mental world of the majority in this semi-literate society, it was by no means untouched by written influences. Even at the beginning of the period, centuries of reciprocal infusion between complementary media had created a cultural repertoire which had long ceased to be purely oral. Thereafter, the expansion of literacy together with the proliferation of texts both in manuscript and print saw the rapid acceleration and elaboration of this process. By 1700 popular traditions and modes of expression were the product of a fundamentally literate environment to a much greater extent than has yet been appreciated.
Author : Leslie C. Dunn
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 20,13 MB
Release : 2016-04-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1317130472
Song offers a vital case study for examining the rich interplay of music, gender, and representation in the early modern period. This collection engages with the question of how gender informed song within particular textual, social, and spatial contexts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Bringing together ongoing work in musicology, literary studies, and film studies, it elaborates an interdisciplinary consideration of the embodied and gendered facets of song, and of song’s capacity to function as a powerful-and flexible-gendered signifier. The essays in this collection draw vivid attention to song as a situated textual and musical practice, and to the gendered processes and spaces of song's circulation and reception. In so doing, they interrogate the literary and cultural significance of song for early modern readers, performers, and audiences.
Author : Gary Taylor
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 1184 pages
File Size : 33,89 MB
Release : 2007-11-22
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0191568554
Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture is not only a companion to The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, which every scholar of Renaissance literature will find indispensable. It is also essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the book in early modern Europe. The book is divided into two parts. The first part, on 'The Culture', situates Middleton within an historical and theoretical overview of early modern textual production, reproduction, circulation, and reception. An introductory essay by Gary Taylor ('The Order of Persons') surveys lists of persons written by or connected to Middleton, using the complex relationship between textual and social orders to trace the evolution of textual culture in England during the 'Middleton century' (1580-1679). Ten original essays then focus on Middleton's connections to different aspects of textual culture in that century: authorship (by MacD. P. Jackson), manuscripts (Harold Love), legal texts (Edward Geiskes), censorship (Richard Burt), printing (Adrian Weiss), visual texts (John Astington), music (Andrew Sabol), stationers and living authors (Cyndia Clegg), posthumous publishing (Maureen Bell), and early readers (John Jowett). The second part, 'The Texts', supplies the documentation for claims made in the first part. This includes detailed evidence for the canon and chronology of Middleton's works in all genres, greatly extending previous scholarship, and using the latest corpus-based attribution techniques. A full editorial apparatus is supplied for each item in The Collected Works: an Introduction, which summarizes and extends previous scholarship, is followed by textual notes, recording substantive departures from the control-text, variants between early texts, press-variants, discussions of emendations, and (for plays) an exact transcription of all original stage directions. Cross-references make it easy to move between the two volumes. This authoritative account of the early texts includes some extraordinarily complicated cases, which have never before been systematically collated: 'Hence, all you vain delights' (the most popular song lyric from the Renaissance stage), The Two Gates of Salvation, The Peacemaker, and A Game at Chess (the most complex editorial problem in early modern drama, with eight extant texts and numerous reports of the early performances).
Author : Adam Smyth
Publisher : DS Brewer
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 34,64 MB
Release : 2004
Category : Alcoholism in literature
ISBN : 9781843840091
Studies of the representation and understanding of drink and conviviality in diverse social contexts.
Author : Penry Williams
Publisher : New Oxford History of England
Page : 650 pages
File Size : 43,36 MB
Release : 1998
Category : History
ISBN : 9780192880444
The Later Tudors, the second volume to be published in Oxford's authoritative series The New Oxford History of England, tells the story of England between the accession of Edward VI and the death of Elizabeth I. The second half of the sixteenth century was a period of intense conflict between the nations of Europe, and between competing Catholic and Protestant beliefs. These struggles produced acute anxiety in England, but the nation was saved from the disasters that befell her neighbors and, by the end of Elizabeth's reign, achieved a remarkable sense of political and religious identity. In this masterly and comprehensive study, Penry Williams explains how this process came about. He begins by weaving together the political, religious, and economic history of the nation, setting out the workings and development of the English state. Later chapters establish the broader perspective, with a thorough analysis of English society, family relations, and culture, focusing on the ways in which art and literature were used to uphold--and sometimes to subvert--the social and political order. The final chapter looks to Europe and across the seas at England's part in the shaping of the New World.
Author : Patricia Fumerton
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 24,74 MB
Release : 2017-05-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1317176375
Bringing together diverse scholars to represent the full historical breadth of the early modern period, and a wide range of disciplines (literature, women's studies, folklore, ethnomusicology, art history, media studies, the history of science, and history), Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800 offers an unprecedented perspective on the development and cultural practice of popular print in early modern Britain. Fifteen essays explore major issues raised by the broadside genre in the early modern period: the different methods by which contemporaries of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries collected and "appreciated" such early modern popular forms; the preoccupation in the early modern period with news and especially monsters; the concomitant fascination with and representation of crime and the criminal subject; the technology and formal features of early modern broadside print together with its bearing on gender, class, and authority/authorship; and, finally, the nationalizing and internationalizing of popular culture through crossings against (and sometimes with) cultural Others in ballads and broadsides of the time.
