![]() I contend that it is more significant to understand this ballad type as symbolic of victimization and power, not exclusively in a gendered way, but as a representation of the Romantic Gothic impulse to revive older forms of narrative. This article explores the ways in which various representations of the Demon-Lover challenge traditional conceptions of this ballad type through a comparison of three English Romantic ballads: Anne Bannerman’s The Dark Ladie, Matthew Lewis’s The Water-King, and William Taylor’s Ellenore. While this intrusion implies the violent and problematic sexual dynamics of the Demon-Lover Motif, Shields’s statement also speaks to how writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries capitalized on the popularity of Gothic conventions such as horror and the grotesque supernatural to imperfectly resurrect the declining literary traditions of folklore and oral narrative. ![]() The Demon-Lover functions as a significant motif in English Gothic ballad tradition, which scholar Hugh Shields articulates as a “supernatural intrusion into a narrative which is of this world” (Shields p.
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