Revising inspiration: Minstrels, bards and improvisers in British and Irish literature, 1757--1830
Abstract
From the middle of the eighteenth century through the first decades of the nineteenth, British and Irish literature teemed with minstrels, bards, improvisers, troubadours, and harpers. Minstrel literature (my shorthand term for writing about all these performers, especially the three mentioned in my title) enjoyed wide circulation, financial success, and critical acclaim. "Revising Inspiration" argues that minstrel literature crossed lines of gender, genre, and nationality, describing poetic performance as a strategic, immediate method of political action. Minstrel literature and Romantic lyricism developed as dialectical contraries. The first chapter lays out the importance of minstrel literature for authorship theory, examining its conventions of self-representation and documentation in relation to more traditional Romantic models. Chapter two examines minstrel texts in the context of national theory, concentrating especially on the internationalism of John Home's Douglas and Sydney Owenson's Lay of an Irish Harp . Chapter three examines the advent of widespread female minstrelsy as Germaine de Staël gave English speakers their first major theory of improvisation in Corinne, or Italy . Corinne 's eponymous improvvisatrice constructs improvisation as a wide-ranging political and artistic theory, articulated in explicit opposition to British minstrelsy. The latter part of the chapter details late Romantic texts that discuss improvisation by Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Letitia Landon, and Hannah More. The fourth chapter explores the importance of James Beattie's The Minstrel for Romantic writers in the Regency, especially Wordsworth's works of 1814-15 and the virtuoso adaptations of minstrel-figures throughout Byron's Regency poetry: the explicit invocations of Beattie and Scott in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage I, the Turkish tale-teller narrating The Giaour , and the improvvisatore -narrator of Don Juan . The fifth and final chapter details late Romantic prize poems and minstrel contest poems. The chapter documents the cultural emergence of literary prizes and minstrel contests in the eighteenth century, then examines how poets used those developments as a means to meditate on the trade in minstrel texts. Felicia Hemans, James Hogg, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon recast the prizes and contests of the literary market in poems about competing minstrels, giving minstrel authorship a retrospective, reflective turn.
Recommended Citation
Erik Charles Simpson,
"Revising inspiration: Minstrels, bards and improvisers in British and Irish literature, 1757--1830"
(January 1, 2001).
Dissertations from ProQuest.
Paper AAI3015373.
http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI3015373
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