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At Vanity Fair Kirsty Milne (University of Oxford)

At Vanity Fair By Kirsty Milne (University of Oxford)

At Vanity Fair by Kirsty Milne (University of Oxford)

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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.

At Vanity Fair Summary

At Vanity Fair: From Bunyan to Thackeray by Kirsty Milne (University of Oxford)

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.

At Vanity Fair Reviews

'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

About Kirsty Milne (University of Oxford)

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.

Table 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.

Additional information

NLS9781107513686
9781107513686
1107513685
At Vanity Fair: From Bunyan to Thackeray by Kirsty Milne (University of Oxford)
Kirsty Milne (University of Oxford)
New
Paperback
Cambridge University Press
2017-08-31
238
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
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