The Wandering Fictions of George Borrow
A Literature on the Move 1840-1940
Published on 30. April 2025
Book
Hardback
240 pages
978-1-3995-4642-3 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
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. -- Roger Ebbatson, Lancaster UniversityMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
3 black & white illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 14 mm
Weight
513 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-3995-4642-3 (9781399546423)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Andrew Radford is Senior Lecturer in Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow, UK. His books include The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion (co-edited with Suzanne Hobson, 2023), British Experimental Women's Fiction, 1945-1975 (co-edited with Hannah Van Hove, 2021), The Occult Imagination in Britain 1875-1947 (co-edited with Christine Ferguson, 2018), Mary Butts and British Neo-Romanticism (2014) and Mapping the Wessex Novel (2010). He has recently published a critical edition of George Borrow's autobiographical novel Lavengro: The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest with Edinburgh University Press (2023).
Content
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
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