Book dossier

Ballad collection, lyric, and the canon

by Steve Newman

"The humble ballad, defined in 1728 as "a song commonly sung up and down the streets," was widely used in elite literature in the eighteenth century and beyond. Authors ranging from John Gay to William Blake to Felicia Hemans incorporated the seemingly incongruous genre of the ballad into their work. Ballads were central to the Scottish Enlightenments theorization of culture and nationality, to Shakespeare's canonization in the eighteenth century, and to the New Criticisms most influential work, Understanding Poetry. Just how and why did the ballad appeal to so many authors from the Restoration period to the end of the Romantic era and into the twentieth century?" "Exploring the widespread breach of the wall that separated "high" and "low" Steve Newman challenges our current understanding of lyric poetry. Newman shows how the lesser lyric of the ballad changed lyric poetry as a whole and, in so doing, helped to transform literature from polite writing in general into the body of imaginative writing that became known as the English literary canon."--Jacket.