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also motivated studies of folklore and folk tales by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and in Germany as well as in Scotland, the ballad craze contributed to the growth of what is sometimes called romantic nationalism. It was not until the Harvard professor Francis James Child produced his collection English and Scottish Popular Ballads, however, that the study of these ballads became scholarly, in the sense of collecting variants, classifying and numbering them, and (no small factor) establishing them within the vernacular literature tradition taught at a major university. During the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s, it became de rigueur to point toward the authenticity of song lyrics by citing Child’s filing system for ballads. Thus, Time magazine, in an article about folksinger Joan Baez, noted that “Folkupmanship absolutely requires that a ballad be referred to as Child 12, Child 200, or Child 209 rather than Lord Randal, Gypsie Laddie, or Geordie.”14

So “what isn’t literature?” may depend upon who is asking, and who is answering, and for what ends: institutional, social, aesthetic, and so on. As Susan Stewart observed, “the literary tradition, in rescuing a ‘folk’ tradition, can just as surely kill it off.” For example, “in order to imagine folklore, the literary community of the eighteenth century had to invent a folk, singing and dancing ‘below the level’ of ‘conscious literary art.’ ” Stewart adds, equally perceptively, that this development has hardly ceased. “The advent of modern literary scholarship, with its task of genealogy—the establishment of paternity and lines of influence—and its role in the legislation of originality and authenticity, depended upon the articulation of a ‘folk’ literature that ‘literature’ was not.”15 Meantime, the saga of the ballad continues. While one branch of this field has reconverged with the public and with performance, through folk singers, blues ballads, and the ballad traditions of America, Australia, and other geographical areas, another branch has taken on a new energy within academic work, with the founding of the English Broadside Ballad Archive at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The archive aims to make these fragile objects, often printed on cheap, degradable paper, accessible to scholars worldwide, by transcribing the black-letter font into more easily readable Roman type, and providing online audio recordings, visual facsimiles, and essays that place the ballads in a historical context. Whether any of these uses are “literary” will depend, still, on whether the ballads are being interpreted as signs of the times or as works of art.

Redeeming Social Value

Books banned as indecent, obscene, or pornographic are often remanded, at least by those who ban them, to the category of something other than literature. This has been the case with some of the most critically admired works of the twentieth century, including Joyce’s Ulysses, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. From the point of view of critics, these were never, arguably, “not literature,” but the customs and postal authorities of the United States, Britain, France, Australia, and other nations that have at one time or another outlawed them saw the matter differently. Here again, the question of use (and of abuse) enters the equation, since one of the criteria for a ruling of obscenity has been that a work has “no redeeming social value.” In this case, it is probably unnecessary to add that abuse (whether self-abuse, child abuse, or some other kind) is sometimes suggested as the intended use, or outcome, of the reading or even the simple possession of the banned book.

Ruling in the case of United States v. One Book Called Ulysses in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1933, Judge John M. Woolsey memorably declared that the book nowhere exhibited “the leer of the sensualist.”16 Defending the frequency with which sex seemed to be on the minds of Joyce’s characters, he observed drily, “it must be remembered that his locale