Ballad Knowledge and the Poetics of Repetition

Traditional Ballads ◽

Chapter 3 explores a genre (the ballad) that was wildly popular in nineteenth-century America, and investigates the ways in which women poets entered into discussions about authorship, poetics, and gender through their engagements with it. Focusing in particular on tropes of faithlessness, pride, laziness, and general “badness” that had long marked traditional ballads, this chapter shows how these tropes came to be associated with women and how American periodicals seemed to embrace the circulation of such ballads. But as women poets took up this genre and were faced with how to rewrite this female figure, they pushed its primary convention—repetition—to its limits in order to make explicit the particular problem that accompanies the recitation of “ballad knowledge” for women. Instead of looking away from the scenes of repetition that disempower women, these ballads go right to the center, employing repetitions to new ends.

Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America. Gillian BrownOther Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832-1898. Anita LevyThe Modernist Madonna: Semiotics of the Maternal Metaphor. Jane Silverman VanBurenGetting an Heir: Adoption and the Construction of Kinship in Late Imperial China. Ann Waltner

Signs ◽

10.1086/494803 ◽

1993 ◽

Vol 18 (2) ◽

pp. 433-438

Author(s):

Nancy Armstrong

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Late Imperial China ◽

Race And Gender ◽

Late Imperial ◽

Imperial China ◽

Abortion, Race, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century America

American Sociological Review ◽

10.1177/000312240406900402 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 69 (4) ◽

pp. 498-518 ◽

Cited By ~ 42

Author(s):

Nicola Beisel ◽

Tamara Kay

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Race And Gender ◽

Brian P. Luskey . On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth‐Century America . (American History and Culture.) New York: New York University Press. 2010. Pp. ix, 278. $48.00. Carole Srole . Transcribing Class and Gender: Masculinity and Femininity in Nineteenth‐Century Courts and Offices . (Class: Culture.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2010. Pp. viii, 324. $75.00.

The American Historical Review ◽

10.1086/ahr.116.4.1125 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 116 (4) ◽

pp. 1125-1126

Author(s):

Elizabeth Faue

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

New York ◽

American History ◽

University Of Michigan ◽

New York University ◽

Class Culture ◽

Masculinity And Femininity ◽

Ann Arbor ◽

A “Vacant Receptacle”? Blind Tom, Cognitive Difference, and Pedagogy

PMLA ◽

10.1632/s0030812900167884 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 120 (2) ◽

pp. 552-557 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Christopher Krentz

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Disability Studies ◽

Mental Disability ◽

Cognitive Disability ◽

Human Beings ◽

Intellectually Disabled ◽

Race And Gender ◽

And Gender ◽

Better Than

If disability studies is often overlooked at universities today, cognitive disability is often overlooked by scholars in disability studies. How should we think and talk about mental difference? Our academic enterprise privileges intellect, as is appropriate. But how should we properly account for human beings who are intellectually disabled? How does mental disability relate to other disabilities or to more familiar identity categories like race and gender? Perhaps no one illustrates these questions better than an intriguing figure who captivated audiences in nineteenth-century America: Thomas Wiggins, also known as Thomas Bethune but most popularly known as Blind Tom.