Oral poetry Book

Ruth Finnegan calls into question the idea that oral poetry is necessarily composed in performance and questions many of the assumptions that are made by scholars dealing with orality. She outlines the implicit and explicit assumptions that many scholars carry: from romanticism, historical-geographic methods, and sociological theories. I find her questions concerning the nature of orality to be especially thoughtful: she wonders if there clear divisions between oral and written forms. She questions the oral-formulaic theory on its insistence of composition in performance. There are many brief examples, but she does not truly expand on them. Her work is thought provoking, especially in her questioning of received tradition on orality.
I also find her discussion in chapter 4 thoughtful - she demonstrates that different cultures/traditions have different poetic styles, casting doubt on the validity of one single model of defining oral poetry by features.
I find Finnegan's understanding or even misrepresentation of Lord's work disturbing (cf. 53). Notably, she discusses terms like "word for word, and line for line" as if Lord was saying that rather than it being the understanding of the poet himself. I feel horrible saying this but I begin to wonder if she truly read Lord's work (it becomes evident later that she did). Maybe she is correct in her assessment of romantic views of oral composition, but such a misrepresentation makes it difficult for me to buy her arguments, especially where she uses the work of others - is she representing their views correctly? I feel like she occasionally takes such a scattered approach and strings together examples not unlike armchair anthropologists. It should be noted that the book was researched and written in the late 1960s and early 1970s: it is dated, especially from a modern folklore perspective, but it is a reaction to the rigid and all encompassing application of Albert Lord's oral-formulaic theory to all poetry without concern for context and genre.