Folksongs and the ethnography of singing in Patrick Kennedy's The Banks of the Boro

The novel The Banks of the Boro, by 19th-century Irish folklorist Patrick Kennedy, contains rare ethnographic information on such things as the performance contexts of bawdy songs, the aesthetics of song choices, and conventional techniques for encouraging or silencing singers. The accuracy of this ethnographic information can be judged by expanding Richard Dorson's definitions of biographical, internal, and corroborative evidence. This technique can be very productive in evaluating the ethnographic nature of other multicultural and/or postcolonial novels