ABSTRACT
William Makepeace Thackeray's imagination, like his texts, is shot through with an indelible impression of the past and the traces it has left in his contemporary world. Ironically, in his writings, the imprint of a nostalgic ache for societies that have dissolved ephemerally in time produces metanarratorial modernity that seeks to explore the entwining of identity and memory. Thackeray's creative historicism differs from the essential characteristics of historical fiction in that, whilst his evocation of historical people and places operates as authoritative background to the historical milieu in which his characters exist, both his fiction and his essays foreground this ambivalent effect between the ephemerality of historical memory and the functioning of the past as a constituent part of the identity of the present. Thackeray's fascination with the author can only be satisfied through text, a composite of anecdotes, personal letters, memoirs, and biographies.
