Mediating Antiquarians in Britain, 1760–1830

This chapter presents an account of what antiquarians do to transmit ballads—gathering, citation, forensic editing, authentication, and quarrels over value. It argues that in its preoccupation with mediality and its navigation of both Enlightenment historiography and antiquarian eclecticism, balladeering asks us to complicate our standard accounts of "enlightenment" and "media." Antiquarian balladeering asks us to take another look at "close reading," for it was precisely through an agonistic, forensic close reading that antiquarians made their cases, established their authority, and bequeathed to later scholars the literary-historical paradigms, objects, and anthologies within and against which we still move.

Economic geography · Geography · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History