Personal Songbooks: Imprints of Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Lithuanian Written Culture

Abstract

With the growth of literacy in society, the tradition of personal collections of texts took root among common people in Lithuania in the second half of the nineteenth century. One of the more popular forms of vernacular literacy turned out to be songbooks which included copied texts of poems and songs. The article focuses on historical and sociocultural contexts which shaped the user of songbooks and formed the distinctive repertory of these collections. The main factors which motivated the distribution of songbooks were the growth of literacy and the increase of secular press. The dynamic of these social and cultural areas of life was also intricately connected with Lithuanian national movement. In the current investigation, songbooks are viewed as a form of self-expression of people and as a manifestation of their cultural and national identity. It has also been observed that personal collections of texts reveal the inclination of their compilers towards the content created and existing within the written tradition. Growing competences in literacy encouraged people to pursue and acquire values associated with the written culture as they were identified with modernity, progress, and authoritativeness. Essentially, songbooks created in the written medium and maintained by it reveal the selective approach of their compilers towards the oral folklore tradition and attest to the priority given to the folk literature of a new style.