William Makepeace Thackeray

William Makepeace Thackeray Lecture 21 The Victorian Age (III) William Makepeace Thackeray: I. Teaching Aims 1. Thackeray: Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero 2. The major achievements of Critical Realism II. Key Points: 1. Thackeray: Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero 2. The major achievements of Critical Realism III. Difficulties: The understanding of Vanity Fair IV. Teaching methods: 1. Direct Method & Communicative Method 2. Authorware Presentation V. Teaching Procedures: 1. The general introduction of Thackeray: Vanity Fair Biographical Introduction William Makepeace Thackeray (1811—63) Thackeray and Dickens were such near contemporaries that it is natural that their work should have often been compare. In education and social status they were widely separated. Dickens had little regular education: his father was often in prison for debt and he himself had early started to earn his living in a blacking factory. Thackeray, born in family of an East India Company official, had the benefits of Charterhouse and Cambridge. Dickens when he was poor knew the meaning of poverty, but for Thackeray to be poor merely meant that for the time one relied on credit. Dickens was excitable, while Thackeray was lack of vitality. Throughout his whole life Thackeray was journalist. He accomplished several novel, for example, The Virginians (1857-58), Henry Esmond (1852), The Newcomes (1857-9), but his masterpiece is undoubtedly Vanity Fair (1847-48). This novel was published monthly in journals, which had a subtitle as A Novel Without a Hero and obviously meant to focus on a class rather than on individual characters. There is, however, a leading character Becky (Rebecca) Sharp who is an embodiment of snobbery and takes the pursuit of property and position as her only purpose in life. The novel gets inspiration from Bunyan’sThe Pilgime’s Progress, intending to satirize hypocrisy and insincerity of the aristocracy and the ruling class. 1.2 Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero A classic social satire; The writer’s intention was not to portray individuals, but the bourgeois and aristocratic society as a whole. Bunyan: “a fair, wherein should be sold all sorts of vanity… Therefore at this fair are all such merchandise sold, as…” 开始热心于慈善事业。 2. The major achievements of Critical Realism: Realists presented a panorama of English society in the early period of Victorian Age, involving all the social strata, for example, upper class in Thackeray’s works, middle and lower class in Dickens’ works, working class in Gaskell’s novels, different areas, for instance, urban or industrial areas in Dicken’s and Thackeray’s novels, rural areas in Bronte sisters’ novels, and many main contemporary problems such as the conflicts between the working class and capitalists, the deteriorating conditions of the labor, the decline of morality from Thackeray’s, pursuit for equality and independence, even distorted, by women and the oppressed from Bronte sisters’, and so on and so forth. Realists established a tradition of criticism in literature. It is through the efforts made by the Realists that criticism was taken as one of main functions of fiction. Realists criticized almost all the aspects of defects of then society, for example, vanity, hypocrisy, shallowness, cruelty, injustice, greed, and so on. Then, literature did not only play a part as a means to construct and educate but a means to criticize, to complain and to repulse so as to awake and to strike and to shock. Realists enriched narrative skills by giving vivid and detailed description greatly to the utmost truth, which established the tradition of realism and laid a foundation for the theory that literature is the reflection of life or even constitutes a mirror of life, which had ever become an important and far-reaching school in literature. Realists contributed a number of masterpieces to world literature, which became a rich legacy for human’s intelligent accumulation. Particularly, they created a series of brilliant characters, for example, Oliver Twist, Copperfield, Pip, Sharp, Jane Eyre, Heathcliff and so on, who are always remembered from generation to generation. References : 1.李正栓，郭群英主编，新编英国文学:[英文本]河北教育出版社，2006 2.彭家海主编,新编英国文学教程，华中科技大学出版社，2006 3.胡阶娜编著，英国文学经典名作选读:[英文本]南开大学出版社，2002 4.萨克雷著,名利场=VANITY FAIR,外语教学与研究出版社，1994.10