Thackeray the Writer: Pendennis to Denis Duval

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.

Table of Contents:
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

About the Author :
Edgar F. Harden received the AB degree from Princeton University and the AM and PhD degrees from Harvard University. Since 1966 he has taught at Simon Fraser University, where he is Emeritus Professor of English. He has published on Browning, Trollope and especially Thackeray in journals that include Victorian Poetry; PMLA; Nineteenth-Century Fiction; Journal of English and German Philology; Huntington Library Quarterly; Studies in English Literature 1500-1900; and Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. He is also the author of The Emergence of Thackeray's Serial Fiction; Thackeray's 'English Humourists' and 'Four Georges'; and 'Vanity Fair': a Novel without a Hero - a Reader's Companion; and he has edited Thackeray's Henry Esmond; Annotations for the Selected Works of William Makepeace Thackeray; The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray: a Supplement; A Checklist of Contributions by William Makepeace Thackeray to Newspapers, Periodicals, Books, and Serial Part Issues, 1828-1864; Selected Letters of Wlliam Makepeace Thackeray; and Thackeray the Writer: From Journalism to 'Vanity Fair'. He has been awarded fellowships and research grants by the Canada Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Review :
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 noble personality.' - Daily Telegraph 'A lively collection of Thackeray's letters, diaries and comical illustrations, Harden's edition...is essential reading for all students of the Victorian novel.' - The Year's Work in English Studies Edgar Harden, with the help of his publishers, has supplied us with a sampling of Thackeray's epistolary art in a form and at a price for every person attracted to Thackeray's works'. - The Thackeray Newsletter