Literary minstrelsy, 1770-1830

the long version

"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.