The Right Words: Conflict and Resolution in an Oral Gaelic Song Text

Laoire, Lillis Ó

doi:10.1353/ort.2005.0008

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Ballad characters are brought to life, time and time again, by ballad singers; while the relationship between the two is fluid and shaped by many factors, identification with aspects of ballad characters or themes is surely one of them 22 . Writing about oral song traditions in an Irish context, the scholar Lillis O'Laoire has noted how subtle variations in an individual singer's version of a song present themselves not as errors but as integral components in the song‐as‐performance; he observed that performances of female singers in a Gaelic oral tradition were characterised by a practice of personalisation, in which the distance between the singer and the song's female narrator was foreshortened through the adoption of a first‐person narrative voice (O'Laoire, 2004, 200–201) 23 . While there are clear differences between the context of the Irish oral tradition that O'Laoire describes and the oral narrative ballad tradition recorded in the Child collection, the finding that female singers in the Child corpus used a first‐person perspective at a consistently higher rate than male singers suggests the presence of similar gendered practices of personalisation in oral ballad tradition.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A woman's tradition? Quantifying gender difference in the Child ballads

Duggan

2023

Orbis Litterarum

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While the major ballad‐collecting efforts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were largely carried out by men, the academic discourse surrounding ballads gendered traditional balladry—orally transmitted narrative poetry—as a woman's tradition. Subsequent ballad scholarship of the twentieth century perpetuated the antiquarian notion of a specifically female ballad tradition, and yet it has remained unclear whether and how this women's tradition should be considered distinct from, for example, a male ballad tradition. This study suggests that a quantitative approach can be used to investigate the question of difference in women's and men's ballad repertoires in the period spanning the mid‐eighteenth century to the close of the nineteenth. Employing Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) software to examine the definitive ballad anthology—the Child collection—this study finds that the notion of a woman's tradition goes beyond stereotypical notions of repertoires gendered by genre; women's ballads are instead found to be characterised by distinctive linguistic patterns that convey a strong focus on female subjectivity.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%