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.

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