Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807-1930

Informationen zum Autor Deborah Epstein Nord Klappentext Gypsies 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. The literary representations that Nord examines have their roots in the interplay between the notion of Gypsies as a separate! often despised race and the psychic or aesthetic desire to dissolve the boundary between English and Gypsy worlds. By the beginning of the twentieth century! she argues! romantic identification with Gypsies had hardened into caricature-a phenomenon reflected in D. H. Lawrence's The Virgin and the Gipsy-and thoroughly obscured the reality of Gypsy life and history. Zusammenfassung Deborah Epstein Nord traces the nearly ubiquitous British preoccupation with Gypsies in imaginative works by John Clare! Walter Scott! William Wordsworth! George Eliot! Arthur Conan Doyle! and D. H. Lawrence. She also exhumes lesser-known literary! ethnographic! and historical texts! exploring the fascinating histories of the nomadic writer George Borrow! the Gypsy Lore Society! Dora Yates! and other rarely examined figures and institutions. These textual representations are characterized by a tension between Gypsies as an alien! often despised "race" and the psychic or aesthetic desire to dissolve the boundary between English and Gypsy worlds. Nord suggests that! by the beginning of the twentieth century! romantic identification with Gypsies hardened into caricature and served to obscure the realities of Gypsy life and history. This phenomenon is reflected most famously in The Virgin and the Gipsy! in which D. H. Lawrence both exploits and criticizes the myth of Gypsies' unfettered sensuality! closeness to nature! and opposition to the oppressive strictures of modern life. Inhaltsverzeichnis List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Children of Hagar1. "A Mingled Race": Walter Scott's Gypsies2. Vagrant and Poet: The Gypsy and the "Strange Disease of Modern Life"3. In the Beginning Was the Word: George Borrow's Romany Picaresque4. "Marks of Race": The Impossible Gypsy in George Eliot5. "The Last Romance": Scholarship and Nostalgia in the Gypsy Lore Society6. The Phantom Gypsy: Invisibility! Writing! and HistoryNotesBibliographyIndex ...

Product details

• Authors: Deborah Nord, Deborah Epstein Nord
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 28.11.2008
• EAN: 9780231137058
• ISBN: 978-0-231-13705-8
• No. of pages: 240
• Dimensions: 146 mm x 229 mm x 19 mm
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > General, dictionaries; Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900, European History, HISTORY / Social History, Social & cultural history, HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / Georgian Era (1714-1837), HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / 20th Century, HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / Victorian Era (1837-1901), c 1800 to c 1900, 19th century, c 1800 to c 1899, 18th century, c 1700 to c 1799, British & Irish history, United Kingdom, Great Britain, Social and cultural history, C 1900 - C 1914, c 1900 to c 1909