William Makepeace Thackeray

Acknowledged, by his contemporaries, as one of the great novelists of the nineteenth century, W.M. Thackeray's critical reputation suffered a marked decline through much of the last century. This book seeks to redress this state of relative neglect by examining a much wider range of writing - from novels to shorter fiction, journalism and criticism - than is customarily familiar to readers of Vanity Fair. The generic and formal diversity of Thackeray's writing is shown to emerge out of the specific material contexts of early to mid-nineteenth century literary culture, primarily the journalistic culture of the periodicals to which he contributed. The book argues, moreover, that the materiality of culture, a recent preoccupation of literary criticism and theory, is one of the most pervasive characteristics of Thackeray's fiction, both as an object of its satire and an aspect of its realism. Thackeray's consciousness of time - his journalistic relationship to the present and antiquarian fascination with memory and the eighteenth-century past - is also a recurrent feature of his writing, which the book considers. The book is divided into chapters along conceptual, rather than strictly chronological, grounds, thus identifying many of the persistent patterns and concerns of Thackeray's work.
About the Author

Richard Salmon is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English, University of Leeds. His publications include articles in the field of Victorian literature and culture and Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (1997).