Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807-1930Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807-1930, is the first book to explore fully the British obsession with Gypsies throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Deborah Epstein Nord traces various representations of Gypsies in the works of such well-known British authors John Clare, Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, George Eliot, Arthur Conan Doyle, and D. H. Lawrence. Nord also exhumes lesser-known literary, ethnographic, and historical texts, exploring the fascinating histories of nomadic writer George Borrow, the Gypsy Lore Society, Dora Yates, and other rarely examined figures and institutions. Gypsies were both idealized and reviled by Victorian and early-twentieth-century Britons. Associated with primitive desires, lawlessness, cunning, and sexual excess, Gypsies were also objects of antiquarian, literary, and anthropological interest. As Nord demonstrates, British writers and artists drew on Gypsy characters and plots to redefine and reconstruct cultural and racial difference, national and personal identity, and the individual's relationship to social and sexual orthodoxies. Gypsies were long associated with pastoral conventions and, in the nineteenth century, came to stand in for the ancient British past. Using myths of switched babies, Gypsy kidnappings, and the Gypsies' murky origins, authors projected onto Gypsies their own desires to escape convention and their anxieties about the ambiguities of identity. |
From inside the book
Results 1-3 of 30
... Wordsworth's and Clare's day , the palpable loss of common lands and open fields , of settled rural com- munities and traditions , had been registered with pain and dismay . Williams estimates that between 1775 and 1825 , about one ...
... Wordsworth's " Gypsies " and , like his predecessor , raises the possibility of the Gypsies ' resemblance to the traveler who narrates the poem . Only in Arnold's poem , the correspondence is fully acknowledged and the Gypsies are ...
... Wordsworth focus on stasis in their poetic evocations of Gypsy groups . For Wordsworth , stasis appears repellent and threatening ; for Clare , it signals rest , shelter , and home . Both poets also understand Gypsies in the context of ...