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Acknowledgments Whatever else writing this book has taught me, it has taught me how many reasons I have to be grateful. During a sojourn at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, I found intellectual fellowship with Julia Garrett and John Price, among many others. Now, at Temple University, I have been gifted with excellent and supportive colleagues like Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Eli Goldblatt, Shannon Miller, Lyn Tribble, Sue Wells (a wonderful chair), and especially Dan O'Hara. Colleagues at other institutions have also been remarkably generous in responding to my work. I had the good fortune early on to benefit from the wise counsel ofAllen Grossman and from the invaluable guidance of Jerome Christensen and Ronald Paulson. Thanks to Marshall Brown, who was crucial to this project in its first stages, and to Janet Sorensen and Sean Shesgreen for sensitive readings. The support of Carol McGuirk, one of Burns's finest readers, has meant more than she may know. I am grateful to the Ballads Group at Rutgers, particularly to Paula McDowell. I owe much to the Philadelphia Works in Progress Group, especially Scott Black, Nora Johnson, Laura McGrane, Kristen Poole, Kathy Rowe, Lauren Shohet, and Julian Yates; Group Phi has taught me a great deal about the relationship of history to form. The scrupulous eye of Jack Kerkering has aided this entire manuscript almost as much as my life has been enriched by his menschlichkeit. I am grateful to Temple for giving me a semester's study leave and two summer fellowships; to the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies , which, along with the Houghton Library, awarded me a W. Jackson Bate Fellowship; and to the Beinecke Library, which gave me a James M. Osborn Fellowship in English Literature and History. Thanks, too, to the rare books 294 Acknowledgments staffs at the Beinecke, the Houghton (including the Harvard Theatre Collection ), Cornell, Haverford, and especially Penn, gracious with their time and permissions. The crack circulation staff at Temple also deserves my thanks. Working with the University of Pennsylvania Press has been a pleasure. To have had Anne Janowitz and Murray Pittock as readers was a lucky thing indeed (and thanks to them for later revealing themselves at my request). All authors should be so fortunate as to find an editor endowed with as much good sense and decency as Jerry Singerman. Thanks, too, to Mariana Martinez and Erica Ginsburg. It is a cliche that you cannot choose your family. But if I could, I would choose exactly the family I have. Thanks to my father-in-law, Patrick McCarthy, for bringing his expert mind and good heart to the manuscript; to my grandmother, Jean Jacobson, for her encouragement; and to my brother, Loren Newman, for his courage. Most of all, thanks to my mother, Rebeca Newman, who always boosts my spirits, and my father, Ronald Newman, who is a first-rate editor as well as one of my best friends; they have given me support and love beyond imagining. As I was finishing this manuscript, I was blessed to have my daughter, Talia Rose Newman, come into the world, and the final revisions were punctuated by her laughing appearances at the door of my study. For her sake, I won't read to her out of this particular book, but I do promise to sing ballads to her now and again. Finally, my deepest thanks to my wife, Keely McCarthy, who has lived with this book as long as I have and has borne it with more patience, faith, and grace than I could ever have mustered. She has lent her considerable intelligence to reading the whole thing many times; what's more, she has kept me together in every sense and made me whole. This book is for her. An earlier version of Chapter 1appeared as "The Value of Nothing: Ballads in The Beggar's Opera:' The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (Summer 2004): 265-83, reprinted by permission of Texas Tech University Press. Chapter 2 contains revised material initially published as "The Scots Songs ofAllan Ramsay: 'Lyrick' Transformation, Popular Culture, and the Boundaries of the Scottish Enlightenment;' Modern Language Quarterly 63, no. 3 (Fall2002): 277-314, reprinted by permission of Duke University Press. ...

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