Literary Antecedents of the Irish Revival Tinker
Literary Antecedents of the Irish Revival Tinker
The opening chapter traces the various imagined ‘Easts’ from which the purported pre-Gaelic ancestors of tinkers and the Oriental antecedents of European Gypsies emerged. The Revival-era theory of tinkers’ pre-Celtic origins drew upon medieval traditions of the vanquished but extant Oriental inhabitants of antediluvian Ireland. Additionally, early modern English classifications of rogues proto-racialized the formerly occupational category of ‘tinker’. Consequently, these exotic associations accompanied the term tinker when the spread of English in Ireland in the 19th century allowed the word to displace unethnicized Irish-language designations for peripatetic peoples. European Enlightenment scholarship linking Gypsies to a distant Indian homeland simultaneously Orientalized a British Gypsy class previously considered native. In the work of Walter Scott, this exoticized Gypsy usurped the indigenous Hiberno-Scottish ‘tinkler’ category, facilitating the perceived retreat of that figure from the whole of the British Isles to its Irish edge by the Victorian period.
Keywords: pre-Celtic populations, Gypsies, Walter Scott, Orientalism, tinklers, rogue literature, origins, Enlightenment, racialization, India
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
