- Title Pages
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Text I
- Introduction
- Text II
- I Centaur-songs: Romanticism and broken forms
- Text III
- 2 Singing the unspeakable
- Text IV
- 3 ‘God was in France all Friday’: incoherence from the inside
- Text V
- 4 Sea-changes: minimal texts as regenerative forms
- Text VI
- 5 Forgetting as in(ter)vention: memory and context in very short songs
- Text VII*
- 6 Beating time: resistance and the subaltern voice in prison work songs
- Text VIII
- 7 Fragments and fringes: the view from the centre
- Text IX*
- 8 The intertextuality of the song fragment
- Text X*
- Conclusion
- Text XI
- Intertexts: contexts
- Works cited
- Index of songs
- General index
Sea-changes: minimal texts as regenerative forms
Sea-changes: minimal texts as regenerative forms
- Chapter:
- 4 Sea-changes: minimal texts as regenerative forms
- Source:
- Fragments and Meaning in Traditional Song
- Author(s):
Mary-Ann Constantine
Gerald Porter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
This chapter discusses minimal texts as regenerative forms. It attempts to show that short and fragmented song-forms have played a crucial part in some of the most stimulating approaches to the process of song variation. The various processes in ballads, including ‘floating’ verses and a ‘tension of essences’ are discussed as well. The chapter also shows the complexity of the processes of oral transmission and the smallness of the units that are capable of evoking stories and of generating rather strong emotional fields.
Keywords: minimal texts, regenerative forms, song variation, ballads, floating verses, tension of essences, oral transmission
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- Title Pages
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Text I
- Introduction
- Text II
- I Centaur-songs: Romanticism and broken forms
- Text III
- 2 Singing the unspeakable
- Text IV
- 3 ‘God was in France all Friday’: incoherence from the inside
- Text V
- 4 Sea-changes: minimal texts as regenerative forms
- Text VI
- 5 Forgetting as in(ter)vention: memory and context in very short songs
- Text VII*
- 6 Beating time: resistance and the subaltern voice in prison work songs
- Text VIII
- 7 Fragments and fringes: the view from the centre
- Text IX*
- 8 The intertextuality of the song fragment
- Text X*
- Conclusion
- Text XI
- Intertexts: contexts
- Works cited
- Index of songs
- General index
