2025 Theses Doctoral

"By Right of Inheritance": Empire and Identity in the First British Folk Revival

Woods, Grant

This dissertation examines the ideological underpinnings of the First British Folk Revival at the turn of the twentieth century, framing it not merely as a movement of nostalgic cultural preservation but as a deeply interventionist project entangled with imperial and racial narratives. Through an examination of the writings and publications of major folk song collectors, as well as the records of the London-based Folk-Song Society, this study interrogates the intellectual, scientific, and racial frameworks through which revivalists defined, collected, and circulated English folk traditions. It thus demonstrates how the Revival functioned as a project of cultural consolidation that shaped a vision of English identity that was simultaneously insular and imperial.

Over four chapters, this dissertation explores how revivalists drew boundaries around English folk music, casting it as a cultural inheritance under threat from modernity, urbanization, and racial hybridity. Chapter 1 focuses on the role of scientific discourse in shaping the methodologies and ideological foundations of the Folk Revival, considering how collectors framed their work as a scholarly endeavor while simultaneously intervening in the traditions they sought to preserve. It delves into issues of authenticity and purity, concluding with an examination of Percy Grainger’s work as a case study of the overlap between linguistic purism and folk revivalist ideology.

Chapter 2 examines the concept of primitivity in folk song discourse, emphasizing how racial and evolutionary frameworks informed revivalist thought. It explores how collectors positioned English folk music within a global hierarchy of musical development that not only cast folk musics as primitive survivals, but which reinforced distinctions between English traditions and their perceived racialized counterparts. A brief interlude follows, tracing evolving conceptions of Englishness in the nineteenth century and their relationship to race and empire.

Chapter 3 then addresses the Revival’s engagement with maritime musical traditions, focusing on how sailor songs and shanties complicated notions of folkloric authenticity and purity due to their inherently hybrid nature. It interrogates how revivalists reconciled these transnational repertoires with their nationalist mission, often downplaying or erasing Afro-diasporic influences in the process. Chapter 4 extends this analysis to settler colonial contexts, using Maud Karpeles’s fieldwork in Newfoundland as a case study of how revivalists exported and reinforced folkloric conceptions of Englishness abroad.

Ultimately, this dissertation argues that the Revival was less about the recovery of an “authentic” past and more about actively constructing a bounded, racialized, and imperial Englishness under the guise of cultural salvage. By positioning folk song collection within broader paradigms of empire and transnational identity, this study addresses a significant gap in existing scholarship, which has focused on the Revival’s ideological dimensions without fully accounting for its colonial and global implications. This work thus situates the First British Folk Revival within a broader context of cultural and imperial identity construction, revealing how folkloric narratives served to legitimize exclusionary and racialized notions of Englishness, with profound implications for how cultural heritage and national identity are defined and claimed.