The Victorian Popular Ballad

Bratton, Jacky

doi:10.1007/978-1-349-02375-2

Cited by 39 publications

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“…79 If it is to have any further utility, parasexuality may best serve not as another reified term in the often dismal maze of critspeak, but as an exploratory concept in the examination of other dimensions of this process. Glamour and its stimulus to the sexual pleasure in looking that is scopophilia plainly gave a new emphasis to the visual element in the changing sexual economy, but the reformers' concern with what pub people termed 'banter' or 'chaff points to the complementary significance of language and spoken codes, which could be as potent yet as contradictory and unstable as the gaze.…”

Section: IVmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In a society where the collective license of carnival had been largely outlawed, and ritualised practises such as bundling (premodern parasexuality with its equivalent of a bar) had lapsed, determination of the informal rules and boundaries of sexual encounter was now pursued in a more fragmented and inchmeal manner, in the individual transactions of a continuously recomposing leisure crowd -London after work, reported Sims, had become 'one vast Lovers' Walk'.78 Thus the mechanistic formula of parasexuality that positioned the barmaid in the Victorian pub dissolved in practice into a more popular discourse, the elasticity of whose rules was scrutinised in a vernacular 'knowingness' that informs music hall song and other popular id i oms. 79 If it is to have any further utility, parasexuality may best serve not as another reified term in the often dismal maze of critspeak, but as an exploratory concept in the examination of other dimensions of this process. Glamour and its stimulus to the sexual pleasure in looking that is scopophilia plainly gave a new emphasis to the visual element in the changing sexual economy, but the reformers' concern with what pub people termed 'banter' or 'chaff points to the complementary significance of language and spoken codes, which could be as potent yet as contradictory and unstable as the gaze.…”

Section: IVmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Parasexuality and Glamour: the Victorian Barmaid as Cultural Prototype*

Bailey

1990

Gender & History

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Sexuality, we are now told, plausibly enough, is everywhere.' Yet recent scholarship, for all its advances, has done little to register or interpret this ubiquity. The history of sexuality in the nineteenth century as the crucial era in the making of its modern sensibility has concentrated on certain areas: the submerged histories of 'deviant' groups; the ideology of written texts; controversies over regulation; and individual cases of that remarkable phenomenon, closet heterosexuality.2 These emphases on the wilder and more esoteric reaches of sexuality reinforce the construct of separate terrains by focussing on the (unacceptable) public face and the (secretive) private face in civil society. What is missing is an illumination of the 'middle' ground of sexuality, not as another exclusive territory, but as an extensive ensemble of sites, practises and occasions that mediate across the frontiers of the putative publidprivate divide.' Arguably it is here -in such everyday settings as the pub, the expanding apparatus of the service industries, and a commercialised popular culture -that capitalism and its patriarchal managers construct a new form of open yet licit sexuality that I propose to term parasexuality, a form whose visual code is known to us as the familiar but largely unexamined phenomenon of glamour.Parasexuality? The prefix combines two otherwise discrete meanings: first, in the sense of 'almost' or 'beside', denoting a secondary, or modified form of sexuality (cf. paramedic); second, the counter sense of being 'against', denoting a form of protection from, or prevention of sexuality (6. parachute).However here the function argued is conceived somewhat differently, as an inoculation in which a little sexuality is encouraged as an antidote to its subversive properties. Parasexuality then is sexuality that is deployed but contained, carefully channelled rather than fully discharged; in vulgar terms it might be represented as 'everything but. ' Everything but what? What is the prime form of sexuality for which parasexuality is taken to offer a modification or antidote? The language of discharge bespeaks a fundamentally male or phallocentric concept of sexuality -the hydraulic model -in which sex is a limited but powaful energy system,

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Section: IVmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: IVmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parasexuality and Glamour: the Victorian Barmaid as Cultural Prototype*

Bailey

1990

Gender & History

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“…Children were set to learn these instructive and inspiring pieces; and what is learned must be recited. 8 Similarly, in the American context, Joan Shelley Rubin has described patriotism as one of three 'prevailing purposes' in school recitation, the other two being 'the cultivation of moral sense and the desire to equip the young with memorised works that could provide "comfort, guidance, and sympathy" throughout life'. 9 Elocutionary belief in the virtue of 'good' speech underpinned recitation in schools.…”

Section: The Poetry Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As Bratton observes, social and technological innovations 'from the growth of the industrial towns to the diversification of the periodical press' changed the audiences for poetry and their literary taste. 21 Les Murray has thus praised the verve and variety of nineteenth-century newspaper poems in Australia, and the way in which popular journals in those days worked to cross-fertilise the high end of verbal art with the low. The Victorian period represented 'the narrow-columned middle ground' of poetry, before the 'social-divide model of Australian verse' 22 had started to appear, after which literary-and, by implication, modernist-elites overruled the mass of poetry lovers.…”

Section: Resuscitating An Immoral Piece Of Poultrymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…25 The Victorian stage was overwhelmingly musical in character, from opera and operetta down to melodrama, fairy ballets and pantomime, but its supreme popular expression was the music hall, in which 'all branches of popular entertainment came to be absorbed'. 26 With its comic monologues and sentimental ballads, music hall was a powerful influence on the popularity of recitation, and artists such as Bransby Williams, renowned for his rendition of J. Milton Hayes' The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God, became famous. In this context, a clear distinction between recitation and character sketches and songs is often difficult, especially as songs performed by actors were sometimes delivered in a kind of Sprechgesang.…”

Section: Resuscitating An Immoral Piece Of Poultrymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Hunting the Wild Reciter: Elocution and the Art of Recitation

Kirkpatrick¹

2007

Talking and Listening in the Age of Modernity: Essays on the History of Sound

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Despite the endurance of bush poetry festivals and an inner-city fashion for contemporary spoken word and performance poetry, these days the recitation of verse in Australia-as in other Western anglophone nations-remains a minority taste. Early last century, things were very different. In the 1920s, Australians were reciting verse all over the place; so much so that the well-known Bulletin humorist 'Kodak' O'Ferrall lampooned them: Way out in the suburbs howls the wild Reciter, Storming like a general, bragging like a blighter; He would shame hyenas slinking in their dens As he roars at peaceful folk whose joy is keeping hens. 'How We Beat the Favourite', 'Lasca', 'Gunga Din', There they sit and tremble as he rubs it in. When he's done they thank him! Never do they rise, Tie his hands and gag him as he rolls his eyes, Bag his head and bear him swiftly through the night. That's the only remedy for villains who recite. 1 Here, from the modern, metropolitan perspective of the professional writer, the reciter is an outlandish form of Homo suburbiensis. An amateur with half-baked literary taste, his choice of party pieces is quaintly Victorian, comprising narrative ballads from Adam Lindsay Gordon to Rudyard Kipling, and extending to Lasca by the Englishman Frank Desprez, in which a Texan cowboy laments the death of his Mexican sweetheart in a cattle stampede. And yet, despite his vulgarity, the reciter's manic energy makes him a force to be reckoned with. It seems only physical violence can put an end to his kind.

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Ballad, Literary

Jackson-Houlston¹

2012

The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature

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The ballad becomes self‐consciously literary towards the end of the eighteenth century, at the point at which its oral transmission and constant recreation begin to come under substantial threat from the mobility caused by social change (Stewart 1994). That icon of Romanticism, Lyrical Ballads (1798), implies in its title the loss of a whole mode of oral narrative culture and its reconfiguration with a concentration on personal emotion. For Wordsworth and Coleridge, the ballad was a form that exemplified simple, affecting statement, because of its roots as far back as a supposed medieval past and its links with ordinary, unsophisticated people. However, Wordsworth's explanation in the Preface to the expanded 1800 edition insists that the emotion of the poems gives significance to the action, not vice versa. This puts the emphasis on the lyrical aspect of the collection, marginalizing the narrative that would be central to a modern, folklorist definition of the ballad. Such an emphasis was characteristic of the period, and the modes of generic adaptation practised by Wordsworth and Coleridge were more widespread than their claims and earlier Romantic scholarship give cause to suppose.

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The Victorian Popular Ballad

Abstract: 1975Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1975

Cited by 39 publications

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Parasexuality and Glamour: the Victorian Barmaid as Cultural Prototype*

Parasexuality and Glamour: the Victorian Barmaid as Cultural Prototype*

Hunting the Wild Reciter: Elocution and the Art of Recitation

Ballad, Literary

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