Martin and Tomas leave Prague on Christmas Day for "that other country." Although their destination is the mountains, their departure has been initiated by a search for their own identity--people in their country have become alike, losing their individuality and becoming products of a totalitarian regime. The pair become the guests of a high school teacher, but Martin falls in love with the teacher's daughter only to lose her in a police suppression, and the Other Country is revealed as a merciless machine of oppression that throws its people into despair.
Originally published in 1995. This book’s collection of key essays presents a coherent overview of touchstone statements and issues in the study of Anglo-American popular ballad traditions and suggests ways this panoramic view affords us a look at Euro-American scholarship’s questions, concerns and methods. The study of ballads in English began early in the eighteenth century with Joseph Addison’s discussions which marked the onset of an aesthetic and scholarly interest in popular traditions. Therefore the collection begins with him and then chronologically includes scholars whose views mark pivotal moments which taken together tell a story that does not emerge through an examination of the ballads themselves. The book addresses debates in tradition, orality, performance and community as well as national genealogies and connections to contexts. Each selected piece is pre-empted by an introductory section on its importance and relevance.
In this pathbreaking book, Allen Forte uses modern analytical procedures to explore the large repertoire of beautiful love songs written during the heyday of American musical theater, the Big Bands, and Tin Pan Alley. Covering the work of such songwriters as Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, and Harold Arlen, he seeks to illuminate this extraordinary music indigenous to America by revealing its deeper organizational characteristics. In so doing, he aims to establish it as a unique corpus of music that deserves more intensive study and appreciation by scholars and connoisseurs in the broader fields of American popular music and jazz. Expressing much of the traditional tonality associated with European music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the love songs of the Golden Age are shown to draw on a rich variety of elements--popular harmony, idiomatic lyric-writing, and Afro-American dance rhythms. His analyses of such songs as "Embraceable You" or "Yesterdays" in particular exemplify his ability to convey the sublime, unpretentious simplicity of this great music.
The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism
Author: Steve Newman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN:
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 304
View: 544
The humble ballad, defined in 1728 as "a song commonly sung up and down the streets," was widely used in elite literature in the eighteenth century and beyond. Authors ranging from John Gay to William Blake to Felicia Hemans incorporated the seemingly incongruous genre of the ballad into their work. Ballads were central to the Scottish Enlightenment's theorization of culture and nationality, to Shakespeare's canonization in the eighteenth century, and to the New Criticism's most influential work, Understanding Poetry. Just how and why did the ballad appeal to so many authors from the Restoration period to the end of the Romantic era and into the twentieth century? Exploring the widespread breach of the wall that separated "high" and "low," Steve Newman challenges our current understanding of lyric poetry. He shows how the lesser lyric of the ballad changed lyric poetry as a whole and, in so doing, helped to transform literature from polite writing in general into the body of imaginative writing that became known as the English literary canon. For Newman, the ballad's early lack of prestige actually increased its value for elite authors after 1660. Easily circulated and understood, ballads moved literature away from the exclusive domain of the courtly, while keeping it rooted in English history and culture. Indeed, elite authors felt freer to rewrite and reshape the common speech of the ballad. Newman also shows how the ballad allowed authors to access the "common" speech of the public sphere, while avoiding what they perceived as the unpalatable qualities of that same public's increasingly avaricious commercial society.
Or, Robert Laneham's Letter; Whearin Part of the Entertainment Untoo the Queenz Majesty at Killingworth Castl, in Warwik Sheer in this Soomerz Progress, 1575, is Signified; from a Freend Officer Attendant in the Court, Unto Hiz Freend, a Citizen and Merchaunt of London
A History of the Ancient Songs, Ballads, and of the Dance Tunes of England, with Numerous Anecdotes and Entire Ballads : Also a Short Account of the Minstrels
Or, Robert Laneham's Letter : Whearin Part of the Entertainment Untoo the Queenz Majesty at Killingworth Castl, in Warwik Sheer in this Soomerz Progress, 1575, is Signified, from a Freend Officer Attendant in the Court, Unto Hiz Freend, a Citizen and Merchaunt of London