Thackeray and the Problem of Realism
Altinel, Ahmed Savkar
Although it is traditional to see a certain kind of «realism» as the essence of fiction, in practice novels of course offer not a simple reproduction of experience but a throughgoing organization of it. The novel is, after all, a bourgeois genre and it reflects that bourgeois view of life according to which the world is there merely to be dominated and controlled by man. This study examines both Thackeray's early fiction, in which both the nov...