|
Showing 1 - 3 of
3 matches in All Departments
This study offers a radical reassessment of a crucial period of
political and cultural history. By looking at some 400 songs, many
of which are made available to hear, and at their writers, singers,
and audiences, it questions both our relationship with song, and
ordinary Britons' relationship with Napoleon, the war, and the idea
of Britain itself.
For three centuries, ballad-singers thrived at the heart of life in
London. One of history's great paradoxes, they were routinely
disparaged and persecuted, living on the margins, yet playing a
central part in the social, cultural, and political life of the
nation. This history spans the Georgian heyday and Victorian
decline of those who sang in the city streets in order to sell
printed songs. Focusing on the people who plied this musical trade,
Oskar Cox Jensen interrogates their craft and their repertoire, the
challenges they faced and the great changes in which they were
caught up. From orphans to veterans, prostitutes to preachers,
ballad-singers sang of love and loss, the soil and the sea,
mediating the events of the day to an audience of hundreds of
thousands. Complemented by sixty-two recorded songs, this study
demonstrates how ballad-singers are figures of central importance
in the cultural, social, and political processes of continuity,
contestation, and change across the nineteenth-century world.
For three centuries, ballad-singers thrived at the heart of life in
London. One of history's great paradoxes, they were routinely
disparaged and persecuted, living on the margins, yet playing a
central part in the social, cultural, and political life of the
nation. This history spans the Georgian heyday and Victorian
decline of those who sang in the city streets in order to sell
printed songs. Focusing on the people who plied this musical trade,
Oskar Cox Jensen interrogates their craft and their repertoire, the
challenges they faced and the great changes in which they were
caught up. From orphans to veterans, prostitutes to preachers,
ballad-singers sang of love and loss, the soil and the sea,
mediating the events of the day to an audience of hundreds of
thousands. Complemented by sixty-two recorded songs, this study
demonstrates how ballad-singers are figures of central importance
in the cultural, social, and political processes of continuity,
contestation, and change across the nineteenth-century world.
|
|