Steve Newman – Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon

The ballad revival, Romanticism and popular print culture overlap and are mutually dependent to a degree that has never been comprehensively charted—the potential field is vast and ill-defined, and the interactions subtle and fluid. 

These relationships between competing literary cultures and physical and oral media are perhaps best examined micro-bibliographically: taking a single author and considering how his or her process of composition reveals tensions between literary expression and the activities of reading and writing, hearing and speaking. 

In Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon, Steve Martin adapts this approach (watering it down somewhat) to investigate how ballads have been used by ‘elite authors’ from the poets of the Restoration to the professional scholars of American New Criticism.