Thackeray the Writer: From Journalism to "Vanity Fair"

Thackeray's development as a book reviewer, journalist, art exhibition critic, short story writer, satirical essayist, and novelist--is a development that culminates in the creation of his masterpiece, one of the glories of English imaginative writing: Vanity Fair. Articulating the connections among these vigorous and lively youthful works, and the growth of Thackeray as an increasingly profound participant-observer, Harden reveals the exuberant imaginative growth and deepening understanding of a supremely insightful perceiver and critic of hum social life. Beginning with Thackeray's struggles to discover and define himself as a writer, Harden traces the coming together of Thackeray's scattered articulations of guiding ethical and artistic principles, Thackeray's discovery of his exuberant comic ability, his increased experience of life, his deepening understanding of human folly (his own crucially included), and his brilliant success as a masterful articulator of the ambiguity of our motives and of their archetypal reenactment in human history.