"The Call of the Popular" Revisited; Or, English Literary History's Resistance to Balladry Corrected

For nearly 300 years, from the late seventeenth until the mid twentieth century, fascination with the popular ballad vitally shaped the development of literary commentary and historiography. Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon revisits the trajectory of ballad and folksong scholarship and imitation; not since Albert Friedman's The Ballad Revival (1961) has the literary historiography of ballad study received such comprehensive treatment. Newman updates Friedman and widens his perspective to include reception of the ballad within a trans-Atlantic context addressed by folklorists but largely omitted by literary historiography. Over the last several decades, folklore or social-history approaches have dominated investigation of balladry. For example, Roger DeV. Renwick's Recentering Anglo/American Folksong: Sea Crabs and Wicked Youths (2001) traces the traditions of individual songs, analyzing modes of oral and collective artistry. Deborah Symonds's Weep Not for Me: Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland (1997) regards ballads as a site for exploring a sociocultural issue. In a welcome return to literary interest, Newman examines the genre as a collective and traditional form that has elicited perennial consideration by critics and scholars.

Newman's book reveals the under-acknowledged importance of the ballad in English literary criticism since the eighteenth century, although the author does not address this situation directly or try to explain the reasons behind it. Examining the popular ballad as it represents the interplay of "high" and "low" culture in the forming of literary value and criticism over two-and-a-half centuries, he implicitly illuminates mid and late twentieth-century theorists' resistance to balladry. As Newman shows, from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, the literary prestige of the lyric ascended, in tandem with that of its narrative kin, the ballad, as middlebrow cultural aspirations on both sides of the Atlantic increased. However, by the mid twentieth century, with written literature seemingly about to be superseded by assorted media, the popular ballad fell from critical fashion. Rooted in collective orality and enlisted by nineteenth-century philologists for grade-school educational reform and the making of good citizens, the ballad genre—unlike its lyric kin—lacked the glamour needed by poststructuralists seeking to invest literary study of the lyric subject with the cultural importance of medicine or psychiatry. The fall of the popular ballad from critical fashion in the late twentieth century coincides with theorists' focus at that time on "high" literary art as the essence of thought. Today, in the twenty-first century, Newman's study is well timed. The short, inherently multimedia ballad—text, song, often woodblock image—is swinging back into academic fashion, neatly suited to internet archiving and distribution.

Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon traces the process by which "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" (1). While the label "lesser lyric" awkwardly identifies the relationship of the two genres, Newman demonstrates interest in the ballad on the part of eighteenth-century writers from Gay to Wordsworth. His examination of the initial belletristic emphasis on lyric and ballad in tandem, as these contributed to the emerging concept of "a canon of English literature," brings a new cogency to this defining moment in literary history. Contributing to English criticism, this volume also enriches the study of American pedagogical practices. With a topic pertinent to folklore and ethnomusicology, Newman's project would have benefited from more familiarity with investigations and theorizing in those fields, so as to position his work in the context of such earlier studies, such as those by Sigurd Hustvedt, Bertrand Bronson, and D. K. Wilgus, or more recent work, such as Mary Ellen Brown's Burns and Tradition (1984). Closer engagement with this massive scholarship...