“SO HARD A STEPMOTHER” TO POESY: LEVERAGING THE TRADITIONAL BALLAD AS EPIDEICTIC RHETORIC AND SOCIAL ACTION

Abstract

Poetics are foundational to both social ideology and rational forms of argumentation. Highlighting a foundational role for rhetorical poetics, I suggest the traditional, third-person narrative ballad idiom as epideictic rhetoric and look at the agential intent of the ballad form from within the foundational elements of its construction/re-construction: its story selection, protagonist selection, narrative sequencing, authorial gaze, and narrative outcomes. The traditional ballad is most widely viewed as a folklore representative of cultural values and beliefs, yet the traditional ballad is also a site of social contest, a challenge to normative cultural ideology and harmful social structures. Despite its distanced wrappings, often we find the “traditional” ballad is a rhetoric narratively structured to apportion blame, an epideictic seeding conviction for the necessity of social change.