Chanteurs et vagabonds. Production et diffusion de la littérature populaire

Folk literature (songs, fairytales) was created and spread by professionals who lived on the fringes of society and who earned their keep by presentations in town or village squares (storytellers) or who found board and lodging by telling stories by the fireside (vagrants and beggars). These forms of production and diffusion are reflected in the tradition itself. We do not have an uninterrupted series of variants produced by the oral tradition, as current Romantic or Neo-Romantic theory would claim. What we find by contrast is a series of different versions, arranged in random fashion, depending on the choice of each professional storyteller and on specific market strategies. The author proposes to distnguish three different categories : (a) redazioni (authorial remakes, characterized by innovations in form and in the narrative plot) ; (b) versioni (local handling of different versions by professionals or semi-professionals, characterized by slight but stable alterations) ; (c) varianti (variations explained by the mechanism of oral transmission). Popular culture is marked by Romantic taste, but it is probably the Baroque aesthetic that gives it its form. An uninterrupted chain of revivals and re-creations is one of the main characteristics of ballads and folktales. Their subject-matter is often of feudal origin, but their form belongs to the Renaissance and their music comes from the Baroque. This literary and musical reorganization of style and folk tradition shows a procedure which is basically similar to the one used by Romantic authors in their reconstruction of the Middle Ages.