Ballads as Vessels for Collective Cultural Memory: A Critical Comparison of Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman” and Federico García Lorca’s “Romance sonámbulo”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24197/ersjes.42.2021.55-79Keywords:
ballad, memory, twentieth-century poetry, Spain, EnglandAbstract
Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman” (1906) and Federico García Lorca’s “Romance sonámbulo” (1928), two early twentieth-century ballad poems, serve as literary vessels for the collective memory of historical periods and share aesthetic and narrative similarities. Common images and colors (red, green) also illustrate both texts. The shared imagery calls attention to the ballads’ roles in preserving and transmitting collective memories. This study references the way that ballads stabilize in cultural memory, in line with David Rubin’s assessments of memory and literature in Memory in Oral Traditions (1995), as well as the studies of other scholars (e.g., Benjamin, Boyd, Connerton).
Downloads
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors retain publishing rights and grant ES Review. Spanish Journal of English Studies right of first publication.
Simultaneously, all articles and reviews published in ES Review until nº 43 are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) while those published from nº 44 onwards will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), by which others are allowed to share and use their work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.
In addition, ES Review allows authors to arrange additional contracts for the non-exclusive publication of the journal’s published version of the work (e.g., in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. In such a case, authors are required to approach the editor(s)/publisher to request permission.