Seminar in 19th Century British Literature: Ballads

Bob Dylan’s 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature was accepted on his behalf by the singer Patti Smith, who performed Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.” Dylan wrote this song in 1963, but it incorporates elements of the British ballad “Lord Randal,” which can be traced back before 1700 in oral tradition. The first collector to publish a version of “Lord Randal” was the famous Scottish bard Robert Burns in 1792. In moving from Burns through Dylan, this course covers a genre that is more popular than literary, but has undeniable elements of both. We will therefore occasionally reach back to the cries of street vendors in sixteenth-century London as well as forward to twenty-first-century popular music. We will also have a chance to consider the relationships between words and music, between the literary and the “subliterary,” between male collectors and female performers, and between cultures—specifically between dominant national cultures and local, regional, or ethnic popular cultures ranging from Scottish folk music to African-American music, as well as the craze for blackface “minstrelsy” that claimed legitimacy from the ballad revival. The last example shows how the ballad tradition was misused in America to promote racism, but it was then reclaimed, as we will see, to support authentic African-American musical traditions. Texts include Burns’s Poems as well as traditional British ballads; Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798); James Francis Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1898); the songs of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey; Angela Davis's Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1998); The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love, and Liberty in the American Ballad (2005); and a wide variety of musical selections. Work for the course will include weekly one-page discussion papers, presentations, and a seminar paper (20-25 pages).