The Wandering Fictions of George Borrow : A Literature on the Move 1840–1940

The first full-length scholarly monograph to scrutinize George Borrow’s published prose works, including his modernist afterlives.

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.