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Book Cover
E-book
Author Karlin, Daniel, 1953-

Title Street songs : writers and urban songs and cries, 1800-1925 / Daniel Karlin
Published Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2018
©2018

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Description 1 online resource (xii, 195 pages, 2 leaves of plates) : illustrations, music
Series Clarendon lectures in English series
Clarendon lectures in English.
Contents Introduction; 1: Orpheus in the city; 2: The child in the street; 3: Lippi sings the blues; 4: The one-legged sailor and other heroes; 5: The voice of an ancient spring; 6: Voulez ouyr les cris de Paris?; 7: The poet and the knife-grinder; Index of Persons; Index of Songs, Arias, Tunes, Rhymes and Street-cries
Summary This book, based on the Clarendon Lectures for 2016, is about the use made by poets and novelists of street songs and cries. Karlin begins with the London street-vendor's cry of 'Cherry-ripe!', as it occurs in poems from the sixteenth to the twentieth century: the 'Cries of London' (and Paris) exemplify the fascination of this urban art to writers of every period. Focusing on nineteenth and early twentieth century writers, the book traces the theme in works by William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, George Gissing, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust. As well as street-cries, these writers incorporate ballads, folk songs, religious and political songs, and songs of their own invention into crucial scenes, and the singers themselves range from a one-legged beggar in Dublin to a famous painter in fifteenth-century Florence. The book concludes with the beautiful and unlikely 'song' of a knife-grinder's wheel. Throughout the book Karlin emphasizes the rich complexity of his subject. The street singer may be figured as an urban Orpheus, enchanting the crowd and possessed of magical powers of healing and redemption; but the barbaric din of the modern city is never far away, and the poet who identifies with Orpheus may also dread his fate. And the fugitive, transient nature of song offers writers a challenge to their more structured art. Overheard in fragments, teasing, ungraspable, the street song may be 'captured' by a literary work but is never, finally, tamed
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and indexes
Subject Fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism
Fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism.
Poetry, Modern -- 19th century -- History and criticism.
Poetry, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism.
Songs in literature.
POETRY -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.
Poetry, Modern
Songs in literature
Poetry
Fiction
English literature -- Themes, motives
English poetry
Poets
Singers
Songs, English, in literature
Genre/Form Electronic books
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780191834363
019183436X
9780192510747
0192510746