ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book considers early nineteenth-century sheet music and romance novels as mutually interactive objects of a social world that remains hitherto unexplored. The definitions of genre would never solidify, but a prescient quotation from the start of the nineteenth century unwittingly described what would happen to the tropes of romance in the next hundred years: The title of romance still invigorates our spirits. The book discusses how theorists have aligned the ballad editor with the romance author, both of whom created different forms of cultural material in the early nineteenth century using the metaphorical figure of the minstrel. It presents the supernatural as a key point of intersection because similar metaphorical figures appeared across fiction and music, demonstrating the prevalence of the theme from around 1800.
