Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-pjpqr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-21T05:18:01.340Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

FORGETTING THACKERAY AND UNMAKING CAREERS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2018

Amanpal Garcha
Amanpal Garcha*
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

One of the peculiar challenges facing scholars who wish to write about Thackeray's fiction is locating a dominant critical account to argue against. The MLA Bibliography contains a great number of examples of scrupulously argued, compelling research into Thackeray's body of writing, but few if any of them have reached any kind of canonical status as the (or even one of the) interpretive accounts that define how critics understand his fiction. It can seem, for example, that Thackeray is either consciously or unconsciously evaded by many scholars seeking to develop overarching, defining accounts of the nineteenth-century novel. In two works that helped set the terms for decades of critical conversation about nineteenth-century literature – Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) and The Novel and the Police (1988) – Nancy Armstrong and D. A. Miller each give at most a passing mention to Thackeray (he shows up four times in Armstong's book; never in Miller's). In their equally influential bodies of criticism, Mary Poovey and Catherine Gallagher provide no sustained – or even fragmentary – treatment of Thackeray's work. Moving into the twenty-first century, one would look in vain for a chapter on Thackeray in Amanda Anderson's The Powers of Distance (2001), Sharon Marcus's Between Women, and Alex Woloch's The One vs the Many (2003) – books that have provided us with key terms, issues, and methods to do our work. (To readers of this journal, it might be not necessary to say the following: Thackeray's fiction includes many illustrations of the phenomena discussed by these works – cosmopolitanism, female-female friendship, and minor characters – so his absence cannot be explained solely on this basis.) And to move backwards from the 1980s, Steven Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, and Raymond Williams produced pioneering analyses of the links between history, ideology, and Victorian literature, but Thackeray's writing played almost no part in their elaboration of those links, with Hillis Miller focusing on Thackeray only in one short essay and one book chapter among his large body of scholarship and Williams omitting him altogether from The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970).

Type
Review Essays
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 46 , Issue 2 , June 2018 , pp. 531 - 545
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CONSIDERED

Anderson, Amanda. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Bartlett, Jami. Object Lessons: The Novel as a Theory of Reference. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. Homo Academicus. Trans. Collier, Peter. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Bousquet, Marc. “The Waste Product of Graduate Education.” How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. New York: New York UP, 2008. 21–29.Google Scholar
Bové, Paul. “The Novel, the State, and the Professions: On Reading Bruce Robbins.” Comparative Literature 62.2 (2010): 179–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dames, Nicholas. “Trollope and the Career: Vocational Trajectories and the Management of Ambition.” Victorian Studies 45.2 (2003): 247–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fenton-Hathaway, Ann. “Gaskell's Detours: How Mary Barton, Ruth, and Cranford Redefined ‘Redundancy.’” Victorian Literature and Culture 42.2 (2014): 235–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garcha, Amanpal. “Imagining a Professional Future: Cognitive Criticism in Our Era of Information Work.” Symploke 24.1 (2016): 385–409.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guillory, John. “Preprofessionalism: What Graduate Students Want.” ADE Bulletin 113 (1996): 4–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harner, Christie. “Physiognomic Discourse and the Trials of Cross-Class Sympathy in Mary Barton.” Victorian Literature and Culture 43.4 (2015): 705–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Howes, Craig. “Pendennis and the Controversy on the ‘Dignity of Literature.’” Nineteenth-Century Literature 41.3 (1986): 265–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kurnick, David. Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, Julia Sun-Joo. The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liu, Alan. The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liu, Alan. “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities.” PMLA 128.2 (2013): 409–23.Google Scholar
Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, J. Hillis. “Trollope's Thackeray.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37.3 (1982): 350–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moulds, Alison. “The Female Witness and the Melodramatic Mode in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton.” Victorian Network 5.2 (2013). 67–88. Web.Google Scholar
Ray, Gordon. Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811–1846. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955.Google Scholar
Recchio, Thomas. “Melodrama and the Production of Affective Knowledge in Mary Barton.” Studies in the Novel 43.3 (2011): 289–305.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Salmon, Richard. The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Salmon, Richard and Crossley, Alice, eds. Thackeray in Time: History, Memory, and Modernity. London: Routledge, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schor, Hilary. Scheherezade of the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Sen, Sambudha. London, Radical Culture, and the Making of the Dickensian Aesthetic. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2012.Google Scholar
Shillingsburg, Peter. Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and William Makepeace Thackeray. Charlottesville: U Virginia P, 1992.Google Scholar
Sutherland, John. Thackeray at Work. London: Athlone, 1974.Google Scholar
Thackeray, William Makepeace. The History of Pendennis. 1849–1850. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Wade, Lisa. “Professors Join the Precariat.” Pacific Standard. 16 Sept. 2013. Web.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond. The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence. London: Chatto & Windus, 1970.Google Scholar
Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.Google Scholar