Describes the historical growth of the movements toward organized literary study in the 19th century and their influences upon the scholarship of their day and our own.

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Describes the historical growth of the movements toward organized literary study in the 19th century and their influences upon the scholarship of their day and our own.

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In this pioneering work, Harrison Ross Steeves explores the role of learned societies in the development of literary scholarship in Great Britain and the United States. He traces the history of these societies from their origins in the 18th century to the present day, and analyzes the contributions that they have made to literary criticism and research. He also assesses their influence on universities, publishing, and other institutions of cultural life. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

This book traces the formation and impact of the New Shakspere Society, created in 1873, which dedicated itself to solving the mysteries of Shakespeare’s authorship by way of science. This promise, however, was undermined not only by the antics of its director, Frederick J. Furnivall, but also by the inexactitudes of the tests. Jeffrey Kahan puzzles out how a society geared towards science quickly devolved into a series of grudge matches. Nonetheless, the New Shakspere Society set the bibliographical and biographical agenda for the next century—an unusual legacy for an organization that was rife with intrigue, enmity, and incompetence; lives were ruined, lawyers consulted, and scholarship (mostly bad) produced and published.

Victorian Songhunters is a pioneering history of the rediscovery of vernacular song—street songs that have entered oral tradition and have been passed from generation to generation—in England during the late Georgian and Victorian eras. In the nineteenth century there were four main types of vernacular song: ballads, folk lyrics, occupational songs, and national songs. The discovery, collecting, editing, and publishing of all four varieties are examined in the book, and over seventy-five selected examples are given for illustrative purposes. Key concepts, such as traditional balladry, broadside balladry, folksong, and national song, are analyzed, as well as the complicated relationship between print and oral tradition and the different methodological approaches to ballad and song editing. Organized chronologically, Victorian Songhunters sketches the history of English song collecting from its beginnings in the mid-seventeenth century; focuses on the work of important individual collectors and editors, such as William Chappell, Francis J. Child, and John Broadwood; examines the growth of regional collecting in various counties throughout England; and demonstrates the considerable efforts of two important Victorian institutions, the Percy Society and its successor, the Ballad Society. The appendixes contain discussions on interpreting songs, an assessment of relevant secondary sources, and a bibliography and alphabetical song list. Author E. David Gregory provides a solid foundation for the scholarly study of balladry and folksong, and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Victorian intellectual and cultural life.