Customer Reviews

William Makepeace Thackeray: A Literary Life (Literary Lives)

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This is an unexpectedly weak effort by Professor Shillingsburg. There is very little biography in this "Life," and insofar as the term chosen by Professor Shillingsburg is "Literary Life," there is surprisingly little literary appreciation here as well. What we find instead are two or three observations on Thackeray's methods repeated over and over. That the narrators in Thackeray's novels were not always omniscient, nor always reflective of Thackeray's own personal views, is simple to grasp, and does not merit the repetitive treatment given in this book. The use of pseudonyms to layer meaning was done far more sophisticatedly in Thackeray's day by Kierkegaard, and has been a literary commonplace ever since. Similarly, the notion that it helps to know something about a period of history in order "to get" the inside references in fiction set in that period is another commonplace that hardly merits being treated, as here, like a discovery. Certainly it does not help to hang a footnote to a reference to the Keating Five (to demonstrate the fleeting memory of even current events), which footnote says they were accused of insider trading in the 1980s. They were, of course, five members of Congress accused of taking bribes in an S&L scandal. This is a disappointing effort by a man of whom better should be expected.