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 12
... Zincali , the German philologist August Friedrich Pott's Die Zigeuner in Europe und Asien ( 1844-1845 ) , and a variety of literary texts , among them Miguel de Cervantes's La gitanilla ( 1613 ) , but her notes are strikingly empty of ...
... Zincali have no god Who speaks to them and calls them his , unless I , Zarca , carry living in my frame . The power divine that chooses them and saves . ( SG 325 ) If there is no God to choose the Zincali , as the God of the Hebrew ...
... Zincali Victorian readers might well have known , asserts that the " Inquisition , which burnt so many Jews and Moors , and conscientious Christians . . . seems to have exhibited the greatest clemency and forbearance to the Gitanos ...