Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry

Maureen N. McLane was educated at the Universities of Harvard, Oxford, and Chicago. She is the author of Same Life: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) and Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population and the Discourse of the Species (Cambridge University Press, 2000; Paperback, 2006). She is also co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2008). A contributing editor at the Boston Review, she was for years the chief poetry critic of the Chicago Tribune, and her articles on poetry, contemporary fiction, teaching, and sexuality have appeared in many venues, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, American Poet, the Poetry Foundation website, The Boston Globe, The Boston Phoenix, the Chicago Review, and the Harvard Review. In 2003 she won the National Book Critics Circle's Nona Balakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing, and in 2007 she was elected to a three-year term on the Board of Directors of the NBCC. She has taught at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, MIT, and the East Harlem Poetry Project, and is currently an Associate Professor in the English Department at NYU. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in jubilat, American Poet, The New Yorker, Slate, Canary, Circumference, A Public Space, American Letters and Commentary, The American Scholar, New American Writing, the Harvard Review, and Jacket. Her interests include contemporary poetry, British romanticism, balladry, historiography, psychoanalysis, anthropology, American studies and Scottish studies.

• Introduction; 1. Dating orality, thinking balladry: of minstrels and milkmaids in 1771; 2. How to do things with ballads: fieldwork and the archive in late-eighteenth-century Britain; 3. Tuning the multi-media nation: minstrelsy of the Afro-Scottish border; 4. How to do things with minstrels: poetry and historicity; 5. Minstrelsy, or, Romantic poetry; 6. Seven types of poetic authority circa 1800; 7. British Romantic mediality and beyond: reflections on the fate of 'orality'; Conclusion. Thirteen (or more) ways of looking at a black bird: or, poiesis unbound.

Review of the hardback: '[A] major book on poetry … A deeply theoretical book, it is still accessible and even lighthearted. … [This] book … has transformed the field and should be required reading. Aware that poets, antiquarians, ethnographers, linguists, folklorists, and more consider ballads their property, she draws upon all and does and admirable job of sorting among them, Her mastery of the subject and method surface time after time … just to be sure this book cannot be mistaken for an old-fashioned ballad study, she gives in-depth treatment to Mungo Park's 'Negro Song', styled an Afro-Scottish border ballad, and to 'Cherokee Death Song'. The paths she traces with them are too good to spoil by telling you; read the book.' Paula R. Backscheider, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900