The Wandering Fictions of George Borrow: A Literature on the Move 18401940

(Hardback)

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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.

Author Bio

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).