[lit-ideas] "Vanitas Vanitatum"
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 17:54:30 EDT
--- From today's powells.com's "Daily Dose" on "Vanity Fair".
Cheers,
JL
VANITY FAIR, by Thackeray.
A marvelous, incisive social satire that gleefully exposes the
greed and corruption raging in England during the turmoil of the
Napoleonic wars through its tracing of the changing fortunes of
two unforgettable women. It is a comic masterpiece that still
resonates today.
Generally considered to be his masterpiece, "Vanity Fair" is Thackeray's
resplendent social satire that exposes the greed and corruption
raging in England during the turmoil of the Napoleonic wars. Subtitled
"A Novel Without a Hero," it traces the changing fortunes of two
unforgettable women: the scheming opportunist Becky Sharpùone
of literature's most resourceful, engaging, and amoral heroines
-- and her foil, the faithful, naive Amelia Sedley. Thackeray's
subversive, comic attack on the hypocrisy and "dismal roguery"
of an avaricious world resonates 150 years later with implications
for our own times.
REVIEWS
"Re-reading Vanity Fair, one realises what a brilliant innovation
this was in the English novel, Thackeray is like the modern novelists
who derive from James and Proust, in his power of dissecting (and
of desiccating!) character."
-- V. S. Pritchett
"Thackeray is an urbane nineteenth-century guide and commentator
in a portrait gallery that is for all time. He is the restless
inhabitant of a prudish age, nostalgic, discursive, anecdotal,
sentimental, worldly-wise, now warning us, now making fun of us,
now reproving us.... Thackeray's harshest criticism of humanity
is simply the point where ours commences. His perception of self-interest
in every act is the ABC of modem psychology."
-- Louis Auchincloss
"In the early numbers of that work he kept the secret at once
of his plans--if he had any--and of his power. So poor were the
beginnings of the tale that the subsequent numbers ran a great
chance of being thrown aside on the faith of the early ones...It
was interesting to see how the writer's power grew and accumulated
by its own exercise. Number after number of the work seemed to
present a new strength drawn out and nourished by the strength
of that which preceded. No reader could have pre-pictured the
final mastery of hand from the feeble workmanship that laid the
first inadequate foundations of that remarkable book."
-- Athenaeum (London), 19th-century
"'Vanity Fair', though it does not include the whole extent of
Thackeray's genius, is the most vigorous exhibition of its leading
characteristics. In freshness of feeling, elasticity of movement,
and unity of aim, it is favorably distinguished from its successors,
which too often give the impression of being composed of successive
accumulations of incidents and persons, that drift into the story
on no principle of artistic selection and combination....Take
from 'Vanity Fair' that special element of interest which comes
from Thackeray's own nature, and it would lose the greater portion
of its fascination. It is not so much what is done, as the way
in which is is done, that surprises and delights; and the manner
is always inimitable, even when the matter is common."
-- Edwin Percy Whipple, Atlantic
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