Oral-Formulaic Theory: Annotated Bibliography

Samuel G. Armistead. "Review Article: Neo-Individualism and the Romancero." Romance Philology, 33:172-81.

Treats five essays from N. D. Shergold's Studies of the Spanish and Portuguese Ballad (1972). Commends their scholarship but warns against their exclusively Neo-Individualist orientation. Notes that by viewing the ballad as principally a vehicle for learned authors, "numerous other developments, such as the Romancero's origins, the complexity of its early tradition, its 17th-19th-c. `estado latente,' its rediscovery in a rich, geographically diverse oral repertoire in the late 1800's, and the splendid fruits of 20th-c. fieldwork have, in general, been disregarded" and "an intermediate trajectory, that of the pliegos sueltos vulgares--between learned poetry and oral tradition--has been almost completely neglected" (181). Calls for recognition of the oral traditional provenance of the ballad.
Area: HI, FB