The Wandering Fictions of George Borrow
A Literature on the Move 1840–1940
- Allows students and academic researchers to access more detailed appraisals of Borrow’s major published works, as well as an array of relevant contexts
- Considers the relation of Borrow’s formally experimental texts to nineteenth-century writings on Romany and traveller subcultures
- Explores Borrow’s notable cultural impact on an array of later Victorian and modernist authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence
- Takes the temperature of recent scholarly debates and critical accounts of George Borrow’s life and literary career
Assessing the full range of Borrow’s published texts, as well as his remarkable impact on a diverse range of Edwardian and modernist cultural producers in the half-century following his death, this book explores the context, origins and development of Borrow’s imaginative enterprise. This project attests to Borrow’s pivotal influence on verbal, visual and performative representations of the ‘gypsy’ between 1840 and 1945 when, as David Cressy observes, ‘more was written in English’ about the Romany than ‘in any previous period of history’. It also uncovers how Borrow’s stylistic idiosyncrasies and formal innovations extend across and between genres, and further into the transitional gaps between life-writing and land-writing and how his books, which were once runaway bestsellers, became side-lined and mere footnotes in the Victorian canon.
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction. A Blast From the Past
2. The Bible in Spain. An Unlikely Victorian Bestseller
3. ‘The Last Genuine Example of the Picturesque?’ Lavengro and The Romany Rye
4. Wild Wales: Borrow the Bad Englishman
5. A New Romanticism, or Borrowed Scenes?
6. Afterword: A Genre of his Own?
Select Bibliography
Index
This wide-ranging and persuasively argued study offers a major reinterpretation of George Borrow’s somewhat overlooked writings, and valuably alerts the reader to crucial issues of tramping, vagrancy and gypsy folklore in the Victorian period. Andrew Radford convincingly demonstrates the ways in which these texts worked to deconstruct the prevailing literary canon, and his exemplary new critique makes a ground-breaking contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century rural writing and its legacy.
