British and Irish Ballads: Poetry and Popular Song in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The ballad is, alongside the lyric, one of the major poetic traditions of world literature. Precisely what a ballad is, however, remains a remarkably vexed question. This is in part because ballads fall inconveniently between disciplines - literature, music, book history, folklore, cultural studies - so that the study of ballads requires a broad interdisciplinary approach. For the literary scholar "ballad" is often used to mean a narrative poem, but this definition does not do justice to a vastly more complex history. Often there is no known author; only occasionally do we have any idea when a ballad was written; even when we know the name of the printer, we cannot be sure the print we have is the earliest printing. Moreover, the printed life of ballads—often cheap slip songs known as broadside ballads—only represents only one part of their existence: they need also to be understood as performance texts that straddle the world of orality and print, and which move dynamically through time, evolving as they travel. Rather than seeing these challenges as hurdles to our understanding, this class will explore the possibilities that the ballad opens up for reconsidering our approaches to the study of literature. In this seminar students will learn about the fascinating history of the popular ballad, and how it gave shape to English literature as a discipline; they will engage with Hesburgh Library's Irish Ballad Collection, which provides a fascinating glimpse into popular street song from the nineteenth century in Britain and Ireland. Through these materials students will learn about the history of the ballad, the mentalities of ordinary people in living in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the vexed relationship between lyric poetry and popular song, and the economics of poetry production. Students should come prepared to discuss controversial subjects, to have their ideas about what constitutes literature challenged; and, above all, they should be willing to listen, learn, and sing together.