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This study traces the successive stages of Thackeray's contact with the German world and analyses the discourse he developed as a result. The author is concerned with the fiction and criticism of Thackeray's :Paris Sketch Book" and the impressions related by the cockney traveller in "Irish Sketch Book" and "Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo". Thackeray's own pictorial illustrations of his writings and those by Cruikshank, Doyle and Walker, which he supervised and supplemented, are recognized as an integral part of his German discourse. The study is a chronological one, setting Thackeray's construction of "German" and "the Germans" against the background of his own development and of the social, industrial, cultural and political history of Britain and its continental neighbours.
List of contents
1 The Manners of the Natives 2 First Steps of a Cultural Go-Between 3 Crossing Frontiers 4 Touchstones and Tribulations 5 Travellers, Musicians and Femmes Fatales 6 Past and Present 7 The Kingdom of Punch 8 The German Booth in Vanity Fair 9 The Restless Children of Cain 1o Shifting Perspectives 11 New Excursions in Space and Time 12 Kings and Sugar-Bakers 13 Endgames, Conclusion: A Field Full of German Folk
About the author
S. S. Prawer
Summary
This study traces the successive stages of Thackeray's contact with the German world and analyses the discourse he developed as a result. The author is concerned with the fiction and criticism of Thackeray's :Paris Sketch Book" and the impressions related by the cockney traveller in "Irish Sketch Book" and "Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo". Thackeray's own pictorial illustrations of his writings and those by Cruikshank, Doyle and Walker, which he supervised and supplemented, are recognized as an integral part of his German discourse. The study is a chronological one, setting Thackeray's construction of "German" and "the Germans" against the background of his own development and of the social, industrial, cultural and political history of Britain and its continental neighbours.
