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Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period, Volume 4

A critical edition of twelve songbooks held in the British Library that have lain virtually unseen since the 1830s. The 286 songs shed important new light on social history and on little-researched forms of entertainment in the years immediately preceding music hall. Scott’s comprehensive introduction “explores consumer demographics, the songs as reflective of shifts in the Romantic aesthetic, literary techniques employed in the song texts, thematic trends within the corpus of songs themselves along with an extensive discussion thereabout, and a note on editing procedure” (JAMS, 65/3 [2012], p. 879). The songs are copiously annotated (54 pages of footnotes).