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1 results

  • Chapter 4 - Continuation, Attachment, and William Makepeace Thackeray

  • Timothy Gao, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
  • Book:
    Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel
    Published online:
    06 April 2021
    Print publication:
    15 April 2021, pp 104-138
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  • Summary

    This chapter compares the longevity of imaginary worlds such as Brontë’s Angria and De Quincey’s Gombroon to Thackeray’s obsessive revisiting of a single novelistic setting over multiple works. For instance, the protagonists of Vanity Fair, Pendennis, The Newcomes, and Phillip are all alumni of a fictional Grey Friars School which connects an expanding network of characters from across his oeuvre. Through his critical writing, I show how Thackeray was concerned about the affective pull of a familiar, imaginary place on the attention of his ever-baggier serial novels; a problem I argue he explores in The Newcomes, a novel about past relationships into which the characters of previous novels repeatedly intrude. Thackeray’s story about these affective entanglements suggests not only a reassessment of his uses of form, but also the conflicting uses of the novel in general, torn between its status as a literary work and as the medium for a fictional reality.