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

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In this seminar students will engage extensively with Hesburgh Library's Irish Ballad Collection, which will form the core corpus of texts for our class, alongside a range of supporting materials from canonical authors. The collection 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. Along the way will be asking what difference cheap broadside ballads such as those found in the collection might make to our understanding of poetry.