Literary minstrelsy, 1770-1830
Subtitle: minstrels and improvisers in British, Irish, and American literature
By: Erik Simpson.
Series: Palgrave studies in the Enlightenment, romanticism, and cultures of print
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York, N.Y
Language: eng
Number of pages: 215
ISBN-13: 9780230200517
Subjects: English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Minstrels in literature; English literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism; English literature -- Irish authors -- History and criticism; American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Authorship in literature; Romanticism
Description: "Literary Minstrelsy, 1770-1830 argues that Romantic-era writers used the figure of the minstrel to imagine authorship as a social, responsive enterprise unlike the solitary process portrayed by Romantic myths of the lone genius. Simpson demonstrates that the minstrel was central to developments as varied as the introduction of the word 'improvisation' into English through portrayals of Italian improvisers, the rivalry between Wordsworth and Byron in the 1810s, and the emergence of poems that dramatized ancient minstrel contests to address the competitive dynamics of the literary marketplace. Reading The Last of the Mohicans alongside a wide range of materials from early nineteenth-century print culture, the book's final chapter draws out the project's implications for the emergence of transatlantic blackface minstrelsy in the 1830s and 1840s."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes index.
Table of contents: title: The minstrel mode; title: The minstrel in the world : international minstrelsy and Sydney Owenson; title: The minstrels of modern Italy : Corinne, improvisation, and minstrel writing; title: The minstrel and regency romanticism : Beattie, Byron, and Wordsworth; title: The minstrel goes to market : prize poems and minstrel contests; title: The minstrel of the western continent : The last of the Mohicans and transatlantic minstrelsy before blackface.