The Printed Record of an Oral Tradition: Anna Gordon Brown's Ballads
Name
THE PRINTED RECORD OF AN ORAL TRADITION- ANNA GORDON BROWNS BALL.pdf
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341.83 KB
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Adobe PDF
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Author(s)
Perry, Ruth
Date Issued
January 2012
Journal
Studies in Scottish Literature
Publisher
University of South Carolina Press
Citation
Perry, Ruth (2012). "THE PRINTED RECORD OF AN ORAL TRADITION: ANNA GORDON BROWN'S BALLADS," Studies in Scottish Literature: Vol. 38: Iss. 1, 71–91.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Humanities. Literature Section
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DOI of Published Version
http://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol38/iss1/13
