Two central questions seem to be indisputable when we consider the presence and canonical relevance of narrative poetry in European Romanticisms. These are first narratives in verse of different types, which featured in all national traditions, and secondly the ballad, which was the most culturally prestigious and influential point of origination of such narrative forms. As examples of poetry that contravened neoclassical mandates about decorum and good taste, popular (and literary) ballads began to accumulate symbolic and cultural capital. They gradually came back to haunt Western literary imaginations in the transitional period between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At this stage, different national traditions presented comparable instances of scholarly and creative engagements with a genre that was perceived as a complex imbrication of features popular and artistic, oral and written, medieval or early modern and as the repository of some of the fundamental and recurrent plot-lines in the literature of all times and places. In the Romantic period, ballads were seen as ethnically and culturally specific manifestations of the underlying similarities interlinking all civilizations. In this double perspective, ballads were inextricably bound up with some of the central concerns of both Enlightenment and Romantic-period culture, an intermediate position that still attracts considerable critical attention, as in the recent collection of essays La Ballade (XVIII-XX siècles): littérature savante, littérature populaire et musique, edited by Judith Labarthe and Claudine Le Blanc (2008).
Located at the nexus of those epistemic shifts that introduced Romantic aesthetics in to the various European literary traditions, the return of the ballad was coterminous with, and in many cases sparked off, a series of wider-ranging investments in narrative poetry. In turn, Romantic verse narrative acquired the status of an archive of cultural values, a fact that would determine its protracted popularity and establish its canonical position in many national literatures until the early twentieth century. Nonetheless, it would be incorrect to assert that a Romantic rediscovery of narrative poetry counteracted its disappearance in the eighteenth century. The latter must not be seen as a phase dominated by shorter verse forms, some of which were eventually superseded by the Romantics re-evaluation of longer narrative forms. The eighteenth century was, after all, characterized by a pervasive passion for epic and the mock-epic. This was a veritable obsession with the supreme genre in rhetorical eague tables which, however, only occasionally resulted in readable and reasonably successful works. From start to finish, eighteenth-century verse was permeated with narrative tendencies, of which the epic was perhaps the most conspicuous. Indeed, if we take the British domain as exemplary, it was in the 1760s that some of the fundamental re-evaluations and reinventions of narrative verse began: James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry, the first instalment of his Ossianic poems, appeared in 1760, Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance in 1762 and Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765. As expressions of the eighteenth-century passion for the epic, as well as for oral and spontaneous poetic forms, these works became extremely influential in Britain and the rest of Europe, paving the way for a renovated production of verse narratives that gradually spread to all literary traditions. The return of narrative poetry also brought about an intensified crossfertilization of narrative verse genres ranging from the epic and the ballad, to re-creations of medieval romances, metrical tales, novels in verse and a whole host of local generic inflections. Possibly one of the most remarkable cross-cultural currents in European Romanticism, this pan-continental explosion of narrative poetry and its distinctive trends have recently been mapped out by Jean-Louis Backès in Le Poème narratif dans l’ Europe romantique (2003). As the pivot of this Romantic-period resurgence of narrative in verse, the ballad was constructed by historians, theorists and writers as an original manifestation, in that it tapped into the (pre)medieval roots of contemporary civilizations. It was also original in the sense of a primordial, unprecedented utterance. Perceived as being on the cusp between written and oral creativity, the ballad was interpreted as an unmediated literary expression, a token of the spontaneity of the fictional impulse. Nevertheless, from our critical and literary-historical standpoint, telling stories can be no simple that is, natural and instinctive act. Instead, it is an intensely ideological procedure, aimed at producing effects of cultural habituation, expansion and resolution. To be sure, from an ideological perspective, one of the reasons why ballads became such momentous cultural documents for the Romantics is that their original utterances appeared to be connate with the origins of the national language. The return of poetical narrative in Romantic-period literatures was inseparable from the processes of delineation of national identities and their attendant voices. Indeed, ballads and other narrative forms in verse functioned as points of accretion of the multiple layers of national cultural identities. Simultaneously, they amounted to discursive transcriptions of the complex interactions of the local, national and trans- or inter-national levels of culture at a time when nationalist discourse was emerging in recognizably modern versions all over Europe.
Moreover, it is essential to note that Romantic-period narrative poetry encapsulated feelings of national belonging and enabled their interiorization not in strictly chronological terms, but rather within a diffuse temporal context. This is what Homi Bhabha has described as the «time of the nation» in his essay DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation (1990) by drawing attention to the «disjunctive time» of the nation as a historical and cultural construct, and thus to the «ambivalent temporalities of the nation-space» based on a combination of «the event of the everyday and the advent of the epochal». In our specific case, Bhabha’s remarks serve to highlight the conflicted temporality of the nation which Romantic-period narrative verse forms concentrated and enacted. They also throw light on the crucial fact that those responsible for resurrecting and investing in ballads as primordial utterances both in the Romantic period and today can access, reorganize and rewrite these original texts precisely because they do not belong to that primordial temporality. In other words, the ballad re-emerges and becomes culturally significant within the temporal gap between an original and primordial dimension and its present re-inscription.
Accordingly, the «Essays» section of this issue explores this challenging combination of past and present cultural dimensions, discrepancies in fictional and critical temporalities, the ambivalent time-frame of nations and verse narratives, by focussing on an array of Romantic-period traditions, from the French to the Italian, the Spanish and the Greek, the Russian and the Polish, the British, German and Occitan. Alaine Muzelle illustrates the sources and origins of the new notion of the ballad as genre, its different interpretations and realizations in German culture during the last two decades of the eighteenth century, and how Bürgers Lenore became its acknowledged and much imitated model all over Europe. The remaining articles throw light on the continuous trespassing of all types of boundaries in the processes of appropriation and reinterpretation of this genre. Sandrine Maufroy’s contribution examines how Claude Fauriel’s programmatic discovery of the folk songs of modern Greece removed its culture from the long Ottoman domination and, by this token, reinserted it into the European ecumene. As a continuation of the classical tradition, modern Greek poetry also provided a concrete and visible example of the historical cycles that led to the formation of new languages and new cultures on the basis of ancient ones. In this light, the study of modern Greek ballads was also a step in the direction of the creation of new philological and linguistic disciplines, as well as of modern ethnography. Leaving Greece behind, which here ideally marks the Eastern boundary of the Mediterranean, Diego Saglia’s essay explores the Western extremity of this sea in order to examine how British scholars, and John Gibson Lockhart’s translations in particular, contributed to a revival of the Spanish romance and a re-evaluation of its relevance to Romantic-period constructions of Spanish culture.
Particular attention in this issue of the journal has been devoted to the appropriation and metamorphosis of the ballad in the Slavic world, which unfortunately is an often overlooked topic in comparative literary studies. Monika Coghen and Gabriella Imposti focus on two pioneers of Romanticism, respectively Niemcewicz in Poland and Zukovskij in Russia, whose works effectively interweave a series of different trends and traditions: from Sentimentalism to English and German Romanticism and the interest in newly rediscovered expressions of local folklore. More specifically, Kułakowska-Lis considers the folkloric motifs in Mickiewicz’s ballads and their complex transformations and intersections with literary sources. Paolo Giovannetti’s concise and crucial outline of the development of the Italian ballata romantica, together with its later dismissive interpretations and simplifications by leading Italian literati such as Carducci, throws light on the genre and contributes to its correct re-positioning in the history of Italian literature. He also offers stimulating insights into contemporary interpretations of the word ballad as a musical phenomenon related to the work of the Italian cantautori tradition which takes this genre back to its folk origins. This process is also amply illustrated in James Wyndham Thomas’s essay on Victor Gelu’s Chansons provençales, which became popular in oral-auditory forms before most of them appeared in print in 1840 and 1856. One of the oustanding instances of lyric poetry in the midnineteenth- century Occitan tradition, Gelu’s Chansons also present unmistakably narrative features which contribute to an intensification of their transitional and intermediate position between oral and literate spheres within contemporary Marseillais culture.
Delineating a trail of parallels, interconnections and echoes, the essays in this issue examine familiar, as well as less well-known figures and texts. They identify a series of concerns that are central to Romantic-era narrative verse forms and comprise translation and transmission, intertextualities, archaeology and antiquarianism, national, regional and class identities. Piecing together a rich mosaic from different cultural traditions, the essays that follow offer valuable insights into the complexities of the revival of ballads and narrative verse as a literary and cultural phenomenon in which notions of recovery and return overlap with the future of identities under construction and the of critical reconstructions of the age.
This issue of La Questione Romantica was edited by Gabriella Imposti and Diego Saglia.