This book 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 highlights the centrality of the minstrel to many important literary developments from the Romantic era through to the 1840s.

List of tables The Minstrel Mode The Minstrel in the World: International Minstrelsy and Sydney Owenson 'The Minstrels of Modern Italy': Corinne , Improvisation, and Minstrel Writing The Minstrel and Regency Romanticism: Beattie, Byron, and Wordsworth The Minstrel Goes to Market: Prize Poems and Minstrel Contests The 'Minstrel of the Western Continent': The Last of the Mohicans and Transatlantic Minstrelsy before Blackface Works Cited Index