ABSTRACT
Ever since William Makepeace Thackeray rose to public notice and critical prominence with the publication of Vanity Fair (1847–48), his work has provoked vehement responses from general readers and, later, academic critics. Particularly in the twentieth century, the changes in the points of debates and the reasons underlying the vehement responses reflected larger variations in academic discussions over the status and practice of criticism as a professional activity. In 1963, for instance, David Stewart criticised the ‘modern detractors’ of Thackeray in terms of their critical orientations: ‘No major 19th century novelist has provoked so much adverse criticism as has Thackeray’ he said, and labelled Thackeray’s detractors as ‘the aristocrats, the psychologists, the Victorian repudiators, and the critical formalists. … Why abuse a man … who will not abase himself before the altar of the novel-as-art. … I fail to see any reason why we must follow Flaubert and James and other Malvolios of the novel exclusively and turn literature into such a pallid, ghastly business’ (629, 630, 637). In 1964, Lionel Stevenson in his chapter on Victorian fiction in the MLA Guide to Research summed up the status of Thackeray as:
perhaps more equivocal than that of any other major Victorian novelist. Most historians of literature still echo his contemporaries in assigning him an importance second only to Dickens. … On the other hand, a few influential modern critics deny Thackeray almost all merit as a novelist, and several of them attack him with a peculiar sort of personal animus which at least testifies to his continuing power to evoke a lively response. (154)
And in 1988, Sheldon Goldfarb noted (in his introduction to his bibliography of Thackeray criticism) that:[to] read recent Thackeray criticism is to encounter deconstructionism, feminism, some Marxism, and a renewed interest in historical approaches. Deconstruction and other literary theories emphasizing discordancies seem naturally applicable here, for if anything is made clear by the recent studies … Thackeray’s works are shot through with ambivalencies and reveal many conflicting impulses. And this doubleness in Thackeray results not only in critical commentary about ambivalences, but in critical disagreement about what Thackeray is doing. (xvii)
Thackeray’s works have consistently resisted being ‘fixed’ by any critical school or ‘explained’ by any critical reading. Consequently, critics and readers, both positive and negative, have been able to use Thackeray’s works as vehicles to apply various critical theories of the novel and to hone their own critical techniques. From the early twentieth century to the Age of Theory, Thackeray’s works have provided grist for the mill of critical experiment.