Original scientific paper
Ballad as Literary Genre
Simona Delić
; Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Abstract
The article offers a brief survey of the main issues in the study of ballad as a literary genre within the literary scholarship of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Special emphasis is placed on the folkloristic aspects of the study of this genre in Croatian oral tradition, Croatian traditional ballad being examined within a comparative context, that of the Mediterranean in particular. Ballad is discussed with regard to its genre-specific aspects, narrative structure (e.g. plot and narrative sequences), transmission of oral poetry in diverse poetic oral traditions (memorisation versus improvisation), folkloristic and literary scientific aspects of field research of the Mediterranean oral traditions (notably those of Hispanic and Croatian tradition) in an attempt to reconcile the philological approach to ballad with that of the literary theory, e.g. with the reader-response theory. The article also deals with the important influence of the so-called Eastern-Sephardic ballads upon Croatian poetic oral tradition in the form of ‘imports’ of international ballads, or parts of the plot (as in a ballad of the La porcheronne type), along with the major influence of Slavic folklore on the Eastern-Sephardic ballad tradition in view of the development of ballad types from the broader ballad area (e.g. Greek poetic oral tradition).
Keywords
traditional ballad; Spanish ballad; comparative study of the ballad genre; theory of reader-response literary criticism; plot; character; international ballad types; Mediterranean ballad tradition
Hrčak ID:
137831
URI
Publication date:
14.4.2015.
Visits: 3.057 *