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.
Explores how Vanity Fair transformed from its Puritan origins as an emblem of sin into a modern celebration of hedonism.
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.
'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
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