Series:

The Thackeray Edition

4 total works

Cover of Catherine

Catherine

by William Makepeace Thackeray

Published 25 June 1999
The Thackeray Edition proudly announces two additions to its collection: Catherine and The Luck of Barry Lyndon. The Thackeray Edition is the first full-scale scholarly edition of William Makepeace Thackeray's works to appear in over seventy years, and the only one ever to be based on an examination of manuscripts and relevant printed texts. It is also a concrete attempt to put into practice a theory of scholarly editing that gives new insight into Thackeray's own compositional process. Written in 1839-40 for Fraser's Magazine, Catherine was Thackeray's first novel. Although originally intended as a spoof of the 1830s Newgate school of criminal romance, it has intrinsic merit of its own for its cynical narrator and roguish heroine, both of whom harbinger similar creations in Vanity Fair eight years later.

Cover of The Luck of Barry Lyndon

The Thackeray Edition proudly announces two additions to its collection: Catherine and The Luck of Barry Lyndon. The Thackeray Edition is the first full-scale scholarly edition of William Makepeace Thackeray's works to appear in over seventy years, and the only one ever to be based on an examination of manuscripts and relevant printed texts. It is also a concrete attempt to put into practice a theory of scholarly editing that gives new insight into Thackeray's own compositional process.

The Luck of Barry Lyndon, serialized in Fraser's Magazine in 1844, is a wonderfully hard-edged advance upon Thackeray's previous writing: a tour de force dramatization at novelistic length of the moral vacuity of its first person narrator. The inner workings of this narrator are far more complicated than in earlier Thackeray writings, and are presented in a far more subtle, yet not humorless, manner. The mock-Bildungsroman aspect of the novel is brought about by the non-enlightenment of the title-figure, his failure to find a meaningful love-relationship, and his inability to discover a calling that identifies both a significant direction for his individual existence and, at the same time, an appropriate accommodation to his duties to society. Achieved in brilliant, accomplished style, Barry Lyndon is a significant and progressive experiment in narration for Thackeray.

Sheldon F. Goldfarb is an independent scholar who received his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia.

Edgar F. Harden is Professor of English, Simon Fraser University.

Peter L. Shillingsburg is Dean of Graduate Studies and Research, Lamar University.

Cover of The Snobs of England and Punch's Prize Novelists
A critical edition of two sharply satirical works This volume of The Snobs of England and Punch's Prize Novelists is an addition to The Thackeray Edition collection, the first full-scale scholarly edition of William Makepeace Thackeray's works to appear in over seventy years, and the only one ever to be based on an examination of manuscripts and relevant printed texts. It is also a concrete attempt to put into practice a theory of scholarly editing that gives new insight into Thackeray's own compositional process. In The Snobs of England, a series of amusing satirical sketches, Thackeray provides a panoramic awareness of the many varieties of human folly, identifying snobbery not as a social attitude but as the unworthy admiration of foolish things. Punch's Prize Novelists presents a series of illustrated burlesque parodies of Thackeray's contemporary writers, including Edward Bulwer, Benjamin Disraeli, Mrs. Catherine Gore, G.P.R. James, Charles Lever, and James Fenimore Cooper. The works are edited here from a comparative study of all relevant documents: from the first published appearances to the last editions touched by the author.

Cover of The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century and Charity and Humour
This book presents engaging lectures on Swift, Pope, Fielding and others by this classic British author. The ""English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century"" collects a series of engaging lectures by W. M. Thackeray on Swift, Pope, Fielding, and others - offering a rare look at this classic author's views of his forbearers. The lectures and the final essay ""Charity and Humour"" were written for an American audience (the latter published in ""Harper's Monthly Magazine"" in June 1853) and showcase Thackeray's views of American sensibilities. Compiled by means of a comparative study of all relevant documents - from the first published appearance to the last edition touched by the author - this edition is a unique achievement. This volume is the latest addition to ""The Thackeray Edition"", a multi-volume series representing the first full-scale scholarly edition of William Makepeace Thackeray's works to appear in over seventy years and the only one ever to be based on an examination of manuscripts and relevant printed texts. This series puts into practice a theory of scholarly editing that gives new insight into Thackeray's own compositional process. Other volumes from the University of Michigan Press available in the series include ""The Snobs of England"" and Punch's Prize Novelists, ""Catherine: A Story"", ""The Luck of Barry Lyndon"", and ""The History of Henry Osmond"".