'At Vanity Fair is built upon a vast amount of research and scholarship (the notes and bibliography run to eighty pages). It is also a pleasure to read. All students of Bunyan will want to consider its arguments, but so too will scholars interested in the burgeoning field of adaptation studies, in book history and the history of reading, and in the concept of intertextuality. Sadly, her untimely death in 2013 meant that Kirsty Milne did not live to see the publication of this outstanding contribution to literary scholarship.' W. R. Owens, The Review of English Studies

'Milne traces [Vanity Fair] as it appears in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, letters, journalism and light verse. The result is a pugnacious and provocative interrogation of the ways in which 'a literary text is constructed' and of the relationship between seventeenth-century Puritanism and the modern free market.' Frances Wilson, New Statesman

At Vanity Fair tells the story of Bunyan's powerful metaphor, exploring how Vanity Fair was transformed from an emblem of sin and persecution into a showcase for celebrity, wealth and power. This literary history, focusing on reception, adaptation and influence, traces the fictional representation of Vanity Fair over three centuries from John Bunyan's masterpiece, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), to William Makepeace Thackeray's own Vanity Fair (1847–8). It explores the influence of anonymous journalists and booksellers alongside well-known authors including Ben Jonson, Samuel Richardson and Thomas Carlyle. Over time, Bunyan's dystopian fantasy has been altered and repurposed to characterise consumer capitalism, channelling memories that inform and unsettle modern hedonism. By tracking the idea of 'Vanity Fair' against this shifting background, the book illuminates the relationship between the individual and the collective imagination, between what is culturally available and what is creatively impelled.
Les mer
Introduction: the boy at the Royal Exchange; 1. 'Copying from life': the literal and the literary in Bunyan's Vanity Fair; 2. Reforming Bartholomew Fair: Bunyan, Jonson, and the transmission of a trope; 3. 'More moderate now than formerly': re-writing Vanity Fair, 1684–1700; 4. 'Gay ideas of Vanity-Fair': transforming Bunyan in the eighteenth century; 5. 'Manager of the performance': Thackeray's Vanity Fair; Conclusion: the fair in vogue; Afterword Sharon Achinstein.
Les mer
Explores how Vanity Fair transformed from its Puritan origins as an emblem of sin into a modern celebration of hedonism.

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781107105850
Publisert
2015-05-12
Utgiver
Vendor
Cambridge University Press
Vekt
470 gr
Høyde
235 mm
Bredde
160 mm
Dybde
17 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
237

Forfatter
Afterword by

Om bidragsyterne

Kirsty Milne (1964–2013) was a highly regarded British journalist and academic. During her career she was staff writer for The New Statesman and The Scotsman, was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, was Fellow at Harvard's Center for European Studies, was author of a pamphlet, Manufacturing Dissent (2005) and gained a Leverhulme Fellowship.