Ballad

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

Download PDF Add to Bookshelf Report an Error
  • The Literary Encyclopedia. WORLD HISTORY AND IDEAS: A CROSS-CULTURAL VOLUME.

The anglophone ballad comprises a broadly defined genre of folk songs with more or less explicit narrative content. Ballads, like other folk songs, have been sung on occasions widely separated in time and space, throughout the English-speaking world, and they often display significant variation in both words and tune while nonetheless maintaining recognisably the same narrative outline. This phenomenon enables the distinction, fundamental to the study of ballads and other genres of folk literature, between “type” and “version”. A “type” is a narrative capable of maintaining an independent existence in the course of transmission, and it can occur in different and varying manifestations or “versions”. All of the versions of a type are considered to be cognate, with the…

2297 words

Citation: Atkinson, David. "Ballad". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 March 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1214, accessed 29 March 2024.]

1214 Ballad 2 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here

Leave Feedback

The Literary Encyclopedia is a living community of scholars. We welcome comments which will help us improve.