Literature Network » Bram Stoker

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources for Bram Stoker's Gypsies.

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From: ANQ
Date: 20050101
Author:Burke, Mary

Although the literary convention of the Gypsy as a popular figure of sensationalist writing was established by the late eighteenth century, an Enlightenment-era study that purported to expose the "Oriental" origins of European Gypsies, Heinrich Grellmann's Dissertation on the Gipsies (1783), consolidated the exemplar of the heathenish, asocial Gypsy, whose appetites and customs were an inverse of, or in monstrous excess of, sedentary norms. The significance of Grellmann's work lies in its crystalization of disparate stereotypes gleaned from earlier commentaries and its construct ...

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