ABSTRACT

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. Lubbock's sense that Thackeray's narrator's point of view is 'Thackeray himself' disengaged him from an absorbed reading and continued the Victorian tradition of identifying Thackeray's narrators with the man. Running through this entire period, from the 1920s to the present, are two primary currents of critical thought, described in general by Daniel Schwarz in his study of Anglo-American criticism of the novel, The Humanistic Heritage. Published in 1986, the study moves from Lubbock to J. Hillis Miller, and argues that however schools of criticism are defined or have defined themselves, the basic tension has been the movement between 'emphasis on form and emphasis on content'. This overview is overly simple because, in fact, Thackeray's formal elements enact the moral preoccupations of his stories.