Ballads and Narrative Poetry.

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. 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. During the last two decades of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the 2oth Bürger's Lenore became the acknowledged and much imitated model all over Europe. This book 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. The continuous trespassing of all types of boundaries in the processes of appropriation and reinterpretation of this genre is also analysed.