Breeches and Metaphysics: Thackeray's German Discourse (LEGENDA/Studies in Comparative Literature 1)

The author traces the successive stages of Thackeray's contact with the German world and analyses the discourse he developed as a result. The `German Sketch Book' which is built up embraces 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 recognised as an integral part of his German discourse. This is the first full-length study, in any language, of Thackeray's observation and presentation of `Germany' and `the Germans' in all the genres in which he worked. The study is a chronological one, setting Thackeray's construction of `Germany' 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.