Forthcoming:
Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.
This book examines the murder ballad form, songs about death and killing, from a legal history perspective. It is held that taking on the long history of the murder ballad is a way that we can understand how death and killing in song has a function in dealing with the world around us. The book integrates law and humanities scholarship with diverse musical case studies to construct a typology of murder ballads and thus conceptualise the central messages of how murder ballads have treated death and killing. Drawing on a cultural form in which assessment and consideration of death and killing are so vigorously and richly enacted gives lawyers a guide to how those who do not see these matters through a primarily legal lens might understand this part of their world. The study will be of interest to academics and researchers working in the areas of Criminal Law, Legal History, Socio-Legal Studies, Criminology, and Musicology.
Here's a short bibliography of secondary sources on murder ballads (there are so many!)
Burt, Olive Woolley, Murder Ballads of Mormondom, 18 Western Folklore 151 (1959).
Kane, Stuart A., Wives With Knives: Early Modern Murder Ballads and the Transgressive Commodity, 38 Criticism 219 (1996).
Mulligan, Roark, Dreiser's Murder Ballad, 3 Studies in American Naturalism 22 (Summer 2008).
Daniel Newman, Murder Ballads and Death in Song, 46 Australian Feminist Law Journal 17 (2020).
O'Brien, Ellen, "The Most Beautiful Murder": The Transgressive Aesthetics of Murder in Victorian Street Ballads, 28 Victorian Literature and Culture 15 (March 2000).
Pettitt, Thomas, Journalism vs. Tradition in the English Ballads of the Murdered Sweetheart, in Ballads and Broadsides in Britain (Routledge, 2010).
Underwood, Richard H., and Carol J. Parris, CrimeSong: Some Murder Ballads and Poems Revisited, 12 Journal of Southern Legal History History 5 (2004).
Website: Murder by Gaslight.
Posts
