Scott’s Minstrelsy and Victorian Ballad Anthologies: Authorship, Editing, and Authority
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Yuri Cowan
Abstract
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the narrative ballad was a conservative genre, understood as a creation of the “common folk”; by mid-century the ballads, in ostensibly authoritative versions, were being repackaged for a middle-class urban audience. In diverse illustrated editions intended for a variety of readerships, these volumes are the work, not of antiquarians or field collectors, but of editors like Samuel Carter Hall, George Barnett Smith, John Harland, and Andrew Lang, who seized upon their editorial position as an opportunity to cement their local or national reputations as “men of letters.” This paper will draw upon the material forms and introductions of representative ballad anthologies to illustrate the ways in which ballads - presented as authentic scraps of popular oral culture - were being repositioned for the same middleclass readership that the editors hoped to speak to as literary authorities.
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Introduction Authorship as Cultural Performance: New Perspectives in Authorship Studies
- Seventeenth-Century Female Author Portraits, Or, The Company She Keeps
- Scott’s Minstrelsy and Victorian Ballad Anthologies: Authorship, Editing, and Authority
- The Professionalisation of Authorship in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
- Rejoicing in the Law: The Performance of Authorship in A View from the Bridge
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Introduction Authorship as Cultural Performance: New Perspectives in Authorship Studies
- Seventeenth-Century Female Author Portraits, Or, The Company She Keeps
- Scott’s Minstrelsy and Victorian Ballad Anthologies: Authorship, Editing, and Authority
- The Professionalisation of Authorship in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
- Rejoicing in the Law: The Performance of Authorship in A View from the Bridge
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
