Songs commonly sung? Ballad collection and the institution of literature in Great Britain, 1660--1820

This dissertation analyzes the unprecedented interest taken by elite British authors in popular songs from the Restoration to the agitations for reform in the 1820s. In contrast to recent accounts of this "Ballad Revival" that have presented it as a uniform retreat from an emergent literary marketplace to an oral-feudal world of minstrelsy, I argue that elite writers use these "Songs, commonly sung up and down the Street" to engage with both the threats and possibilities of modern print culture. This engagement was central to the British literary canon and to the contests over status, nationality, and gender that marked its institution.;Chapter 1 draws a contrast between the songs of Court songwriter Thomas D'Urfey, which hew to the Royalist strategy of foregrounding the lowness of the ballad as a sign of aristocratic license, with the periodical essays of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, which transform the unruly texts of "the common People" into a "common Sense" that should be appreciated by the polite reader. Chapter 2 focuses on Allan Ramsay, who emphasizes the historicity and affective richness of songs in order to exhibit his Addisonian "common Sense" but also to defend the dignity of Scottish culture in the wake of the Act of Union. The four mid-century antiquarians examined in Chapter 3---William Collins, John Home, Thomas Percy, and Charlotte Brooke---deepen the ballad's reputation for emotive power but locate that power in a more remote past.;Wordsworth's challenge to this minstrelsy is the concern of Chapter 4. Although recently critiqued for sacrificing history on the altar of imagination, Wordsworth in fact argues through his ballad parodies that the Ballad Revival is responsible for coercing readers into a facile and sensationalized history. The literary pedagogy he would substitute figures into Chapter 5, which considers the ballad's competing destinations in the early nineteenth century---the schoolroom and the street. The chapter ends with William Blake's attempt to avoid the "Pity"ing condescension of prior elite appropriations of ballads and to bridge the gap between individual and collective voices so as to realize the democratic ideal of the public sphere.