Thackeray the Writer Pendennis to Denis Duval [Hardcover]

This book conveys Thackeray's development as a novelist, lecturer in Great Britain and the United States, familiar essayist, and shaper of cultural awareness as editor of a major new journal - a development especially growing out of the achievement of Vanity Fair , where he has so powerfully articulated the comical and absurd system of forces defining the human existence that he and his readers shared. Articulating the connections among Thackeray's varied work and activities, Harden reveals the broadening imaginative growth and deepening understanding of a supremely insightful perceiver and critic of human life.Preface List of Abbreviations The History of Pendennis The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century and the History of Henry Esmond The Newcomes The Four Georges and The Virginians Lovel the Widower The Adventures of Philip Roundabout Papers Denis Duval Notes Index

Reviews of previous books

Thackeray the Writer: From Journalism to Vanity Fair by Edgar Harden

'Harden's approach usefully supplements biographical responses to Thackeray's hardest years and works which focus on the writer's negotiation of the publishing market-place' - In Brief, Times Literary Supplement

'The present work will help even old hands to see the way in which [Thackeray] developed...into the humorist with the truly complex world view and moral subtlety of Vanity Fair.' - The Thackeray Newsletter

The Selected Letters of William Makepeace Thackeray by Edgar Harden

'These letters, so amusing and so touching are a wonderful introduction not only to Thackeray the novelist but to the letter-writing world of the Victorians.' - Contemporary Review

'some of the warmest and wittiest documents to survive from that age of great letter-writing...anyone who glimpses the monument uncovered by this inspiring excavation of Thackeray's heart will encounter both a great writer and a nobls8