- Chapbook Ballads and the Social Imagination
Awards
Author(s):
Category:
Institution:
Region:
Winner Category:
Year:
Abstract:
- Whilst some fields of literature have become saturated with academic criticism, others remain neglected due to canonical elitism. The current obscurity of eighteenth and nineteenth-century chapbook literature is emblematic of the way in which huge swathes of literary culture have been erased from contemporary consciousness due to their supposed lack of artistic value. This essay, however, contends that this issue is not a purely artistic one, but one that belies the working of vested socio-economic interests by denying ‘popular literature’ not sanctioned by the academy any claim to the status of ‘literature’. Engaging in original research on material that is freely available and yet almost unexamined, it shows that the apparent clumsiness of chapbook ballads and romances encodes a set of complex aesthetic expectations dependent upon the harrowing social and economic conditions endured by typical chapbook audiences. This essay attacks this question by coupling traditional methods of close literary analysis with a more comparative and even genealogical approach in order to understand the implications of motifs that recur throughout the chapbook corpus. It moreover engages with the modern scholarly consensus that a book is a physical entity as much as a purely literary one by investigating how chapbook illustrations can help us construe an aesthetic that is highly imitative and bent towards sensationalism. This essay concludes that whilst chapbook literature is accessible as imaginative art and not just as a cipher to the material conditions which produced them, an ‘imaginative sympathy’ which is understanding of the social exclusion behind their bizarre conventions will be necessary to undo the canonical exclusion they have suffered. A surge of interest in ‘popular literature’ has thankfully occurred in recent years, but this essay hopes to take it in a direction which has hitherto been extremely neglected.
Attached Documents: