NEW BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT:
The Voice of the People
Writing the European Folk Revival, 1760-1914
Edited by
Matthew Campbell (University of York) and
Michael Perraudin (University of Sheffield)
A series of essays on literary aspects of the pan-European folk revival from the late
eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth.
Imprint: Anthem Press
Hardback
ISBN 9781843318941
March 2012 | 232 Pages
PRICE: £60.00 / $99.00
http://www.anthempress.com/index.php/the-voice-of-the-people.html
'The Voice of the People' presents a series of essays on literary aspects of the European folk
revival through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its approach is both topical and
generic, addressing not just the question of what purposes the folk revival served but also its
many forms and genres. It focuses on two practices of antiquarianism, namely the key role
that collecting and editing played in the formation of ethnological study in the European
academy, and the business of publishing and editing that produced many 'folkloric' texts of
dubious authenticity. Collecting and editing went hand-in-hand with plagiarism and forgery in
the practice of many: much English, Scottish and Irish folk-song is of late-eighteenth century
literary origin. Across Europe, too, national literary identities were often based on origins
supposedly discovered in the people, but which were frequently the stuff of fiction. As was the
case with Russian and Czech folklore, an interest in the folkloric was often successfully
hybridised, with, for example, a continuing emphasis on classical patterns instructing the
creation of vernacular art forms. In Germany, debate about the folk served the purposes of a
radical writing in a time of successive political upheavals.
In addition to exploring these tendencies, 'The Voice of the People' also presents readings of
various genres: epic, song, tale and novel. It contributes to the study of several crucial
European literary figures, from Macpherson and Percy, Herder and Burns, to Heine, Pushkin,
Moore and Morris. But most of all it concerns the great anonymous authors of the European
folk tradition in narrative and lyric art and their relation to the cultural movements and
imagined identities of the peoples of the emerging nineteenth-century European nation.
'The Voice of the People' offers an original take on folklore revivals through its attempt to
integrate British examples of the literary and antiquarian uses of folk art with a strong account
of comparable movements in Europe.
Table of Contents:
Introduction - Michael Perraudin and Matthew Campbell;
1. The Impact of Ossian: Johann Gottfried Herder´s Literary Legacy - Renata Schellenberg;
2. On Robert Burns: Enlightenment, Mythology and the Folkloric - Hamish Mathison;
3. The Classical Form of the Nation: The Convergence of Greek and Folk Forms in Czech
and Russian Literature in the 1810s - David L. Cooper;
4. Literary Metamorphoses and the Reframing of Enchantment: The Scottish Song and
Folktale Collections of R. H. Cromek, Allan Cunningham and Robert Chambers - Sarah M.
Dunnigan;
5. Thomas Moore, Daniel Maclise and the New Mythology: The Origin of the Harp - Matthew
Campbell;
6. The Oral Ballad and the Printed Poem in the Portuguese Romantic Movement: The Case
of J. M. da Costa e Silva´s Isabel ou a Heroina de Aragom - J. J. Dias Marques;
7. Class, Nation and the German Folk Revival: Heinrich Heine, Georg Büchner and Georg
Weerth - Michael Perraudin;
8. The Estonian National Epic, Kalevipoeg: Its Sources and Inception - Madis Arukask;
9. The Latvian Era of Folk Awakening: From Johann Gottfried Herder´s Volkslieder to the
Voice of an Emergent Nation - Kristina Jaremko-Porter;
10. From Folklore to Folk Law: William Morris and the Popular Sources of Legal Authority -
Marcus Waithe;
11. Pioneers, Friends, Rivals: Social Networks and the English Folk-Song Revival,
1889-1904 - E. David Gregory;
12. The Bosnian Vila: Folklore and Orientalism in the Fiction of Robert Michel - Riccardo
Concetti;
Epilogue The Persistence of Revival - Matthew Campbell and Michael Perraudin;
Bibliography; Index
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