Includes bibliographical references (p. [325]-350) and index.

Introduction : straws in the wind / Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini -- Remembering by dismembering : databases, archiving, and the recollection of seventeenth-century broadside ballads / Patricia Fumerton -- The art of printing was fatal : print commerce and the idea of oral tradition in long eighteenth-century ballad discourse / Paula McDowell -- Child's ballads and the broadside conundrum / Mary Ellen Brown -- Journalism vs. tradition in the early English ballads of the murdered sweetheart / Thomas Pettit -- Do you take this hog-faced woman to be your wedded wife? / Tassie Gniady -- Advertising monstrosity : broadsides and human exhibition in early eighteenth-century London / Anita Guerrini -- And I my vowe did keepe : oath making, subjectivity, and husband murder in "murderous wife" ballads / Simone Chess -- Tracking the petty traitor across genres / Frances Dolan -- Ballads and the emotional life of crime / Joy Wiltenburg -- The maiden's bloody garland : Thomas Warton and the elite appropriation of popular song / Steve Newman -- Ne sutor ultra crepidam : political cobblers and broadside ballads in late seventeenth-century England / Angela McShane -- William Hogarth's pregnant ballad sellers and the engraver's matrix / Elizabeth Mitchell -- War and the media in border minstrelsy : the ballad of Chevy Chase / Ruth Perry -- Heroines gritty and tender, printed and oral, late-breaking and traditional : revisiting the Anglo-American female warrior / Dianne Dugaw -- Music and Indians in John Gay's Polly / Noelle Chao -- Afterword : ballad futures / by Bruce R. Smith.