Thousands of literary, popular, non-fiction and archival texts since the eighteenth century document the human experience of the British industrial canal. This book traces networks of literary canal texts across four centuries to understand our relationships with water, with place, and with the past. In our era of climate crisis, this reading calls for a rethinking of the waterways of literature not simply as an antique transport system, but as a coal-fired energy system with implications for the present. This book demonstrates how waterways literature has always been profoundly interested in the things we dig out of the ground, and the uses to which they are put. The industrial canal never just connected parts of Britain: via its literature we read the ways in which we are in touch with previous centuries and epochs, how canals linked inland Britain to Empire, how they connected forms of labour, and people to water.

The exotic and dangerous stereotype of the Gypsy woman formed in 19th-century literature and visual culture remains alive today. These contemporary cliches about Gypsy culture - both negative and romanticised - have a long history. In The Gypsy Woman, Jodie Matthews analyses why the representation of female Gypsy figures in print, painting, television series such as Big Fat Gypsy Weddings and social media sites like Instagram matters so much. Some of these images have been so damaging that they require legal regulation, but Matthews claims that supposedly positive portrayals are just as detrimental by reiterating the same story about Gypsies that have been told since the 19th century. Her study makes this book a highly relevant resource for students, teachers and researchers working in literary, cultural, gender and Romani studies.

Poetry, prose, fiction, whatever you want to call it, it's in here, a completely egotistical bunch of writing compiled for my own sake.

The exotic and dangerous stereotype of the Gypsy woman formed in nineteenth-century literature and visual culture remains alive today. These contemporary cliches about Gypsy culture - both negative and romanticised - have a long history. In The Gypsy Woman, Jodie Matthews analyses why the representation of female Gypsy figures in print, painting, television series such as Big Fat Gypsy Weddings and social media sites like Instagram matters so much. Some of these images have been so damaging that they require legal regulation, but Matthews claims that supposedly positive portrayals are just as detrimental by reiterating the same story about Gypsies that have been told since the nineteenth century. Her study makes this book a highly relevant resource for students, teachers and researchers working in literary, cultural, gender and Romani studies.