Ballads into Books

The Editors: Tom Cheesman lectures in German at the University of Wales Swansea and is the author of The Shocking Ballad Picture Show (1994).
Sigrid Rieuwerts lectures in English at the Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz and is working on a major study of «The Gypsie Laddie» (Child 200). Both have published widely in the field of traditional and popular song.

Contents: Tom Cheesman and Sigrid Rieuwerts: Introduction: Child Who? - Sigrid Rieuwerts: In Memoriam: Francis James Child (1825-1896) - Mary Ellen Brown: Mr. Child-s Scottish Mentor: William Motherwell - David Atkinson: Sabine Baring-Gould-s Contribution to The English and Scottish Popular Ballads - Michael J. Bell: 'To Realize the Imagined Community': Francis Barton Gummere and the Politics of Democracy - William Bernard McCarthy: Olive Dame Campbell and Appalachian Tradition - Julia C. Bishop: 'The Most Valuable Collection of Child Ballads with Tunes Ever Published': The Unfinished Work of James Madison Carpenter - James Moreira: Genre and Balladry - Thomas Pettitt: The Ballad of Tradition: In Pursuit of a Vernacular Aesthetic - Flemming G. Andersen: 'There Were Three Sisters' (Child 10): One Ballad and Two World Views - Wolfgang Braungart: Goethe's Ur-Ei : Literature, Media, Anthropology and the Ballad - Nathan Rose: A Literary History of 'Child Owlet' (Child 291) - Gerald Porter: Telling the Tale Twice Over: Shakespeare and the Ballad - Stephen Knight: From Print to Script: Editing the Forresters Manuscript - Dianne Dugaw: The Politics of Culture: John Gay and Popular Ballads - Faye Ringel: 'Stealing Plots and Tropes': Traditional Ballads and American Genre Fiction - Tony Conran: 'The Maid and the Palmer' (Child 21) - Pauline Greenhill: 'Who's Gonna Kiss Your Ruby Red Lips?' Sexual Scripts in Floating Verses - Thomas A. McKean: Gordon Easton and 'The Beggarman' (Child 279/280) - Frankie Armstrong (with editorial assistance from Brian Pearson): On Singing Child Ballads -David Atkinson: A Child Ballad Study Guide with Select Bibliography and Discography - Tom Cheesman: Online Resources - Tom Cheesman: Publications of the SIEF Ballad Commission.

«This is a rich and varied collection of twenty-one papers and is representative of the state of current ballad scholarship...anyone interested in the ballad will want this book.» (Vic Gammon, Folk Music Journal)