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Poor Pearl, Poor Girl!: The Murdered-Girl Stereotype in Ballad and Newspaper (American Folklore Society Memoir Series) by [by] Anne B. Cohen is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Poor Pearl, Poor Girl!: The Murdered-Girl Stereotype in Ballad and Newspaper (American Folklore Society Memoir Series) about?

The year was 1896, and nineteenth-century journalists called the murder of Pearl Bryan the'Crime of the Century.'From the day Pearl's headless body was found to the execution of her murderers on the gallows, the details of the murder fascinated newspaper reporters and ballad composers alike. Often glossing over the facts of the case, newspaper accounts presented the events according to stereotypes that were remarkably similar to those found in well-known murdered-girl ballads, such as'Pretty Polly,''Omie Wise,'and'The Jealous Lover.'Events, characters, motivations, and plot were presented through this framework: the simple country girl led astray by a clever degenerate. Nearly all variants of the Pearl Bryan ballad point the same moral: Young ladies now take warning Young men are so unjust, It may be your best lover But you know not whom to trust. Representations of this formula appear in such diverse genres as the ballad'Poor Ellen Smith'and the novel An American Tragedy. As Anne Cohen demonstrates, both newspaper accounts and ballads tell the Pearl Bryan story from the same moral stance, express the same interpretation of character, and are interested in the same details. Both di

Author

[by] Anne B. Cohen

Publisher

Austin: Published for the American Folklore Society by the University of Texas Press

Published

1973

Language

EN

ISBN

9780292735118

Subjects

History, Science, True Crime

Rating

3.25 / 5 (4 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14