REquired REading
Here is the short anthology of ballads we will be reading on the course. Please download it, read it, and either print it or bring it to class on your laptop or tablet. Remember that wifi connections on campus are not always reliable, so make sure you download it before class if you decide not to print it. Note that you can also open it here and annotate it using hypothes.is.
Online ballad resources
There are some excellent online resources for exploring the ballad. Here are some of the best:
English Broadside Ballad Archive (University of California, Santa Barbara
Broadside Ballads Online (Bodleian Library, Oxford University)
English Ballads (National Library of Scotland)
(When you click on a ballad, you’ll see an image. To simply read the text of the ballad, scroll down to under the image, and click on ‘Transcription’.)
The Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Ballad
The ballad has always been closely linked to music and song, and popular music in the last sixty years especially has rediscovered the ballad as a vital form. Here is Joan Baez singing the very old ballad ‘Henry Martin’ (see our wee ballad anthology), Bob Dylan performing his remarkable ‘ Ballad of a Thin Man’, and performance poet Kate Tempest reciting her ‘Ballad of a Hero’ (performed here under its alternative title, ‘War Music’). If you have favourite ballads, you can comment directly on this page using hypothes.is, and add links to yours.
Critical writing on the ballad:
Attridge, Derek. ‘The Rhythms of the English Dolnik’, in Critical Rhythm: The Poetics of a Literary Life Form , ed. by Ben Glaser and Jonathan Culler (Fordham, 2019) – on metre in the ballad
Bold, Alan. The Ballad (London, 1979) – chapter 2 (you can also find this excellent short book in the library at PR507 .B6 1979.
Hitchcock, David. 2016. ‘Rogue Ballads‘, in Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750 (Bloomsbury, 2016). (N.B. This is a longer, more detailed and complex study of the representation of beggars and vagrants in popular ballads, but it has a lively introduction and is well worth a look.)
