From Song to Print is a study of the major cultural transition from oral forms of art and discourse to the commercial culture of print that happened during the Industrial Revolution. Through a discussion of ancient musical forms (classical, biblical, and early-modern poetry of song), this book explores the typographical simulation of music and oral poetry during the nineteenth century. Original and innovative, this work shows how the musical writings of Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Keats, evoke antique cultures and ancient settings while offering a critique of their own imitative forms and the modern, commercial context in which they appear.

This book is a cultural history of the nineteenth-century songster: pocket-sized anthologies of song texts, usually without musical notation. It examines the musical, social, commercial and aesthetic functions songsters served and the processes by which they were produced and disseminated, the repertory they included, and the singers, printers and entrepreneurs that both inspired their manufacture and facilitated their consumption. Taking an international perspective, chapters focus on songsters from Ireland, North America, Australia and Britain and the varied public and private contexts in which they were used and exploited in oral and print cultures.