Strategies For Subversion In Eighteenth-Century Broadside Ballads

Street literature, which generally describes any literature that was quickly written or plagiarized, printed on a sheet of paper, and sold for pennies on the streets, especially during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, has largely been ignored by literary scholars until recently. Although such literature did excite the interest of eighteenth-century collectors of ephemera such as Selden and Pepys, it has never really been considered worthy of literary study.