ENGL 197: |
Upper-Division Seminar
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Early English Broadside Ballads |
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| Winter 2008 |
| Instructor: Patricia Fumerton |
| Meets on: W 12:00 PM - 2:30 PM moved to SH 2510 |
| Prerequisites: Writing 2, 50, or 109; English 10; or upper-division standing |
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| This course cannot be repeated and is limited to upper-division English majors only. |
Early English Broadside Ballads
This course will study the culture of the most published and most read of literary forms in early modern England: the broadside ballad. In the first weeks of the course, we will situate ballads within their historical, political, social, and aesthetic contexts. We will read a sampling of ballads of the period together with critical works about them, and consider the kinds of persons who wrote and published ballads, as well as the nature of ballad music (tunes and refrains), formal features of the ballads (woodblock images, black-letter print, meter), practices of circulation, and some recurrent themes popular in the period: for example, monstrous happening and husband murder. We will then focus on the collection of over 1,800 ballads made by Samuel Pepys, reading and analyzing a selection of ballads from each of the various categories by which Pepys grouped his collection (History, Love Fortunate, Love Unfortunate, Drinking and Good Fellowship, etc.). This course will further involve students in the Early Modern Center’s ongoing enterprise to create an unprecedented online English Broadside Ballad Archive, beginning with the ballads collected by Pepys. Assignments: Two oral and written reports on a facet of ballad culture generally and on a ballad theme in the Pepys collection (6-10 minutes; 3-4 pages each) as well as checking some transcriptions of black-letter ballads and/or using Photoshop to mount online Facsimile Transcriptions in the Pepys Ballad Archive.
Link to English 197 course website
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