What the Ballad Knows

Adrian Daub is Professor of German Literature and Comparative Literature at Stanford University and author of Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism (2012), Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth-Century Culture (OUP, 2014), and The Dynastic Imagination: Family and Modernity in Nineteenth Century Germany (2020). He is co-author with Charles Kronengold of The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism (OUP, 2015).

• Introduction: What the Ballad KnowsChapter 1: The Ballad's Years of Travel: The Musenalmanach for 1798, Orality, and the Ballad FormChapter 2: The Ballad, The Voice and the Echoes of WarChapter 3: Balladic Consciousness: The Ballad on the Opera StageChapter 4: Memorizing Ballads: Pedagogy, Tradition and the Open SecretChapter 5: The Ballad and the FamilyChapter 6: The Ballad and Its NarrativesChapter 7: The Ballad, the Public and Gendered CommunityChapter 8: The Ballad and the Sea: Regionalism, Mourning and the Modern National ImaginaryEpilogue: The Ballad as RecordAcknowledgmentsIndex

Adrian Daub's brilliant synthesis of the many lives of ballads in German culture breathes new and more complex meaning into Eric Hobsbawm's and Terence Ranger's concept of invented traditions. Daub calls the ballad "poetry one lived with," and his subtle, lucid analysis of its many contexts—travel, family, the schoolroom, the public sphere, the national imaginary—sketches a great arc of continuity in German life. It is erudite, graceful, and wise—a major achievement.