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
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... Holocaust enabled —or forced - Gypsies to recognize themselves as historical subjects and to articulate ( through testimony and through institutions like the Holocaust Museum ) their relationship to the devastating experience of ...
... Holocaust , but as expressions of a variety of attitudes , some highly discriminatory and racist , others sympathetic and tolerant . In this regard , Jonathan Boyarin's argument about the occlusion of the pre - Holocaust European Jew ...
... Holocaust and prompted them to investigate what had happened . He recalls going to the Smithsonian Institution in the early 1960s in search of more information about the fate of European Gypsies . After museum staff quizzed him ...