The Gypsy Woman: Representations in Literature and Visual Culture

Every time we read or view a representation of a Gypsy woman, we have a textual encounter, a moment with her, one that has a context and a history. This book explores the texture of those encounters and the way they open out onto other encounters of the past, present and future. Individual Gypsy characters have been studied in the past, as has the representation of Gypsies in particular time periods. This work departs from previous scholarship by taking a feminist transhistorical approach to convergent textual encounters with the Gypsy woman, an approach explained in more detail throughout the introduction. This does not mean it is simply a wide (never mind exhaustive) survey or catalogue of representations of Gypsy women across all periods, but rather a sustained examination and appreciation of the way that textual encounters – the reader or viewer meeting the Gypsy woman in a text – are connected to others and how, via that connectivity, they converge on particular ideas: race (chapter two); Orientalism (chapter three); authenticity (chapter four); fortunes and curses (chapter five); and a kind of travelling domesticity (chapter six).