Adrian Daub is Professor of German Literature and Comparative Literature at Stanford University and author of Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism (2012), Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth-Century Culture (OUP, 2014), and The Dynastic Imagination: Family and Modernity in Nineteenth Century Germany (2020). He is co-author with Charles Kronengold of The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism (OUP, 2015).

• Introduction: What the Ballad Knows


• Chapter 1: The Ballad's Years of Travel: The Musenalmanach for 1798, Orality, and the Ballad Form


• Chapter 2: The Ballad, The Voice and the Echoes of War


• Chapter 3: Balladic Consciousness: The Ballad on the Opera Stage


• Chapter 4: Memorizing Ballads: Pedagogy, Tradition and the Open Secret


• Chapter 5: The Ballad and the Family


• Chapter 6: The Ballad and Its Narratives


• Chapter 7: The Ballad, the Public and Gendered Community


• Chapter 8: The Ballad and the Sea: Regionalism, Mourning and the Modern National Imaginary


• Epilogue: The Ballad as Record


• Acknowledgments


• Index

In What the Ballad Knows, author Adrian Daub elucidates the complex relationship between ballads and nationalism in 19th century German culture.