At Vanity Fair - From Bunyan to Thackeray

Explores how Vanity Fair transformed from its Puritan origins as an emblem of sin into a modern celebration of hedonism.

List of contents

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.

About the author

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.

Summary

In The Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan presented Vanity Fair as a place of sin and punishment, but by the nineteenth century it had come to symbolise glamour and worldliness. Kirsty Milne explores the fascinating story of a literary metaphor that has utterly reversed its meaning over three centuries of fiction.

Product details

• Authors: Kirsty Milne, Kirsty (University of Oxford) Milne, Milne Kirsty
• Assisted by: Sharon Achinstein (Afterword), Achinstein Sharon (Afterword)
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.05.2015
• EAN: 9781107105850
• ISBN: 978-1-107-10585-0
• No. of pages: 237
• Subjects: Education and learning > Adult education/adult education classes; Humanities, art, music > History > Regional and national histories; History of Ideas, English, 19th century, c 1800 to c 1899, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, c 1000 CE to c 1500, Literary studies: general, Modern Period, C 1500 Onwards, C 500 CE To C 1000 CE