The premier scholar of the English-language traditional or
popular ballad, Francis James Child spent decades working on his
widely read and performed collection, "The English and Scottish
Popular Ballads." In this first single author monograph of Child's
life and work, Mary Ellen Brown analyzes Child's editorial methods,
his decisions about which ballads to include, and his relationships
with colleagues at Harvard and abroad. Brown draws on his extensive
correspondence with collaborators to trace the production of his
monumental work from conception and selection through organization
and collation of the ballads. "Child's Unfinished Masterpiece"
shows readers what was at stake in Child's search for original
manuscript materials housed at libraries and estates far afield and
his desire to uncover unedited versions of previous editors' texts.
In analyzing Child's letters, Brown also delves into his important
network of collaborators, scholars, and friends such as William
Macmath, Sven Grundtvig, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot
Norton, who influenced the organization and content of his work.
Readers learn about the questions Child faced as an editor: whether
the materials he gathered were authentic, whether a piece was more
ballad or a song, or whether the text was sufficiently old or
traditional. In showing Child's struggles with content and
organization for "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, " Brown
notes the difficulty in defining the ballad genre while also
showing that a clear definition is not a fatal flaw of the volume
or to scholars' continued study of it.
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