Recommended Reading (by Subject):
Note: you should be familiar with all the works in Giles Bergel’s Reader for his Fall 06 print and ballad culture class. Especially important works from this Reader are listed below. For cohesiveness, this list also includes readings from our current syllabus:
Print Culture Generally:
Adrian Jones,“Introduction,” The Nature of the Book (EMC), pp. 1-74; and chapter 2, “Literatory Life: The Culture and Credibility of the Printed Book in Early Modern London,” pp. 74-136, 136-86 (in EMC)
Defining Ballads:
Fiona McNeill, “Ballads,” Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, ed. David Scott Kasten ( Oxford, 2006), pp. 1-5 (Fumerton Winter07 Reader)
M. H. Abrams, “Ballad,” in A Glossary of Literary Terms (Thomson Wadsworth, 2005), pp. 18-20.
Leslie Shepard, The Broadside Ballad: A Study in Origins and Meaning (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1962).
Hyder E. Rollins, “The Black-Letter Broadside Ballad,” PMLA, 34, no. 2 (1919): 258-339 (Handout).
Tessa Watt, Cheap Print, pp. 11-127, 257-95
Adam Fox, “Ballads, Libels, and Popular Ridicule in Jacobean England, “ Past and Present 145 (1994): 47-83; also chapter on “Ballads and Libels,” in Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500-1700 ( Oxford, 2000) (in the EMC)
Audience and Attitudes to Ballads:
Garrett Sullivan and Linda Woodbridge, “Popular Culture in Print,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1500-1600, ed. Arthur Kinney, pp. 264-86 (in Fumerton Fall 04 Reader)
Margaret Spufford, “Elementary Education and the Acquisition of Reading Skills,” from her Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (in EMC and also in Fumerton Fall 04 Reader), pp. 19-43
Henry Chettle, “The Friendly Admonition of Anthonie Now now,” in his Kind-Hartes Dreame (1592), pp. 15-23 (in Fumerton Fall04 Reader)
Robert S. Thompson, “The Transmission of Ballads” (Part II, chap. 1), in “The Development of the Broadside Ballad Trade and its Influence upon the Transmission of English Folksongs” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Queens’ College, 1974), pp. 169-91 (in EMC).
Natascha Wurzbach, “Reputation of the Street Ballad,” in Rise of the English Street Ballad, pp. 242-52 (in EMC)
Ballad Circulation: Orality/Performance, Printers/Publishers, and Peddlers/Chapmen:
Tessa Watt, 'Publisher, Pedlar, Pot-Poet: The Changing Character of the Broadside Trade, 1550-1640', in Spreading the Word: the Distribution Networks of Print, 1550-1850, edited by Robin Myers and Michael Harris, (Winchester: St. Paul's Bibliographies,1990), 61-81 (in Bergel Reader).
Watt, Cheap Print, pp. 11-59, 74-86.
Natascha Wurzbach, “Literary and Social Conditions for the Rise, Distribution and Textual Structure of the Street Ballad,” in Rise of the English Street Ballad, esp. pp. 1-27 (in EMC)
Bruce R. Smith, “Ballads Within, Around, Among, Of, Upon, Against, Within,” in The Accoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor ( Chicago, 1999), pp. 168-205 (in Fumerton Winter07 Reader).
Robert S. Thompson, “Introduction,” “The Broadside Ballad Printer” (Part I, chaps. 1-2) and also “The Transmission of Ballads” (Part II, chap. 1), in “The Development of the Broadside Ballad Trade and its Influence upon the Transmission of English Folksongs” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Queens’ College, 1974), pp. 5-80 (Reader) and 169-91 (in EMC).
Cyprian Blagden, 'Notes on the Ballad Market in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century', Studies in Bibliography, 6 (1953), 161-180 (in Bergel Reader)
William St. Clair, 'At the Boundaries of the Reading Nation,' Chapter 17 in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 339-356; Appendix 4: 'Intellectual Property. Popular Literature, England', 499-505 (in Bergel Reader and in EMC); also Chapter 8 “Shakespeare,” pp. l40-157.
Ballad Measure:
Fiona McNeill, “Ballads,” Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, ed. David Scott Kasten ( Oxford, 2006), pp. 1-5 (Fumerton Winter07 Reader)
M. H. Abrams, “Ballad,” in A Glossary of Literary Terms (Thomson Wadsworth, 2005), pp. 18-20
Black Letter:
Charles C. Mish, “Black Letter as a Social Discriminant in the Seventeenth Century,” PMLA 68 (1953): 627-30 (Fumerton Winter07 Reader).
Keith Thomas, “The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England,” in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, ed. Gerd Baumann ( Oxford, 1986), pp. 97-131 (Fumerton Winter07 Reader)
Zachary Lesser, 'Typographic Nostalgia: Playreading, Popularity and the Meanings of Black Letter', in The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England, edited by Marta Straznicky, ( Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 99-126 (in Bergel Reader)
Joseph Dane and Svetlana Djananova, “The Typographical Gothic: A Cautionary Note on the Title Page to Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry,” Eighteenth-Century Life, 29:3 (2005): 76-97 (in Bergel Reader).
Joseph Donatelli, ‘"To Hear with Eyes": Orality, Print Culture, and the Textuality of Ballads’, in Ballads and Boundaries: Narrative Singing in an Intercultural Context, edited by James Porter, (Los Angeles: Department of Ethnomusicology & Systematic Musicology, UCLA, 1995). 347-357 (in Bergel Reader).
Woodcuts:
Watt on Illustrations, Cheap Print, pp. 131-216
Mark Booth, “Broadside: ‘Description of a Strange Fish,” from his The Experience of Songs, pp. 97-113 (Fumerton Winter07 Reader).
William M. Ivins, Jr., How Print Looks (Beacon Press, 1988), pp. 124-3.,
James A. Knapp, “The Bastard Art: Woodcut Illustration in Sixteenth-Century England,” in Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England, ed. Douglas A. Brooks (Ashgate, 2005), pp. 151-72 (Paddy owns a copy)
Alexandra Franklin, “The Art of Illustration in Bodleian Broadside Ballads before 1820,” Bodleian Library Record, 17, no. 5 (2002): 327-52 (Fumerton Winer07 Reader)
Tunes and Music:
Claude M. Simpson, The Broadside Ballad and Its Music ( Rutgers, 1966); in EMC
