Research Catalog

Title

Street songs : writers and urban songs and cries, 1800-1925 / Daniel Karlin.

Author

Karlin, Daniel, 1953-

Publication

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2018.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xii, 195 pages, 2 leaves of plates : illustrations, music; 22 cm.

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 the0singers 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. 0Throughout 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.

Series Statement

Clarendon lectures in English series

Uniform Title

Clarendon lectures in English.

Subjects

• Fiction
• Street music
• Fiction > 20th century > History and criticism
• Poetry, Modern > 20th century > History and criticism
• Poetry
• Poetry, Modern > 19th century > History and criticism
• Music and literature
• Street musicians
• Cries in literature
• Fiction > 19th century > History and criticism
• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• 1800-1999

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Contents

Orpheus in the city -- The child in the street -- Lippi sings the blues -- The one-legged sailor and other heroes -- The voice of an ancient spring -- Voulez ouyr les cris de Paris? -- The poet and the knife-grinder.

Call Number

JFD 19-719

ISBN

• 0198792352
• 9780198792352

LCCN

2018947080

OCLC

1039671954

Author

Karlin, Daniel, 1953- author.

Title

Street songs : writers and urban songs and cries, 1800-1925 / Daniel Karlin.

Imprint

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2018.

Type of Content

text

still image

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Series

Clarendon lectures in English series

Clarendon lectures in English.

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Chronological Term

1800-1999

Other Form:

Electronic version: Karlin, Daniel, 1953- Street songs. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2018 9780191834363 (OCoLC)1048935435

Research Call Number

JFD 19-719