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McMaster has made an extensive identification and detailed study of the many kinds of allusions to be found in The Newcomes. There are allusions to classical, foreign-language, and English literature, as well as to the Bible, fables, theatre, opera, popular songs, nursery rhymes, newspapers, art, English and French history, and the topography of London. These allusions saturate the text of The Newcomes and appeal to several different readerships. McMaster specifies what Thackeray's contemporaries would have recognized and responded to and suggests interactions between the text and its readers.

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves.

Dickens was a fashionable writer, and from what we know he was also a very fashionable person, but the use of the colour yellow in his works differs surprisingly from the fashion of his times. He hardly uses canary yellow for his materials, and he abstains from the use of yellow as an indication of brightness and symbol of optimism and hope, too. Yellow in Dickens is not a gay or illuminating colour, and it seems that Dickens creates his own logic of colours, in which he uses yellow predominantly not as a primary colour but as a tinge, a discolouring of that which was formerly white, or conceived of as white. This does not mean, however, that the use of the colour in his works is not heavily invested with symbolism--quite the opposite. Dickens uses his own colour code, and yellow signifies both the literal and metaphorical imprisonment in and of old age.

Il n'est pas question ici de comparer Thackeray a son grand rival, Dickens. Jacqueline Fromonot situe cette ecriture dans son contexte culturel et social, mais aussi biographique, et elle l'aborde a partir d'un large eventail d'approches critiques (rhetorique classique, taxonomie des figures, narratologie structuraliste, modelisation de 1'humour et de 1'ironie, theorie de la reception, pragmatique et philosophic du langage, linguistique) permettant d'en saisir toute la singularite. 2 Thackeray est d'abord une voix tres caracteristique, et la monographic de Jacqueline Fromonot souligne bien cela, puisqu'elle commence par examiner 1'extreme variete des regimes d'adresse, notamment a travers les tons et les postures adoptes. L'hybridite du style thackerayen est, elle aussi, soulignee, a travers 1'etude de la fa^on dont 1'auteur combine discours diegetique et digressions theoriques, dans une ecriture qui oscille entre essai et fiction. L'analyse stylistique realisee dans cette monographic souligne aussi le role important des langues dans 1'ecriture de Thackeray, auteur polyglotte. Nous redecouvrons ainsi sous un jour nouveau Henty Esmond, Pendennis, Vanity Fair, The Book of Snobs et The Newcomes, a travers les « etrangismes » qu'ils contiennent et les fonctions que Thackeray confere a ces elements (emprunts, metissage de la langue, mediation, effets humoristiques plurilangues...) Il y a des passages savoureux sur la locution protocolaire « not at home » dont Tecrivain fait ressortir la verite dans sa dimension d'acte langagier. Il en prolonge et complete les approches originales en proposant une description magistrale du style de Thackeray, de ses effets et de ses enjeux, et ce a travers Tensemble de son oeuvre depuis ses debuts jusqu'aux textes de la maturite et en abordant tous les genres pratiques par Tauteur. AUTEURS NATHALIE VANFASSE AMU REFERENCE Jacqueline Fromonot, Figures de I'instabilité dans I'oeuvre de William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), etudé stylistique.

This article argues that Lord Byron's Don Juan repeatedly references digestion-and failures of digestion-to register the visceral effects of almost twenty years of near-continuous global warfare on bodies and especially stomachs. If epic is traditionally understood as a poetic form that aggrandizes and gives coherence to the brutality of war, Don Juan reworks epic as a way of rendering the experience of war poetically undigestible. In doing so, the poem develops a non-reparative poetics of indigestion that represents the violence and trauma of war without attempting to celebrate war or make it easily consumable.

[...]about two-thirds of the Juvenile Dramas promote a broadly Whig world-view, and some even endorse a radical Whig agenda. Because those who uphold liberal, Whiggish principles are admirable characters, they counter the negative public image of the Whigs.' Reading plays, and sometimes participating in an amateur performance of a children's play, could provide an evening 's entertainment at home.® Well-off parents, cognisant of their sons\" possible careers as politicians, barristers and clergymen, knew the value of effective public speaking, assured stage presence, and appropriate delivery. Knowledge of plays and acting ability contributed to the general social skills, which young elite men were expected to acquire to advance their careers. Toy Theatres The strength of schoolboy enthusiasm for the theatre can be seen in the growing availability of commercial toy theatres and printed ephemera pertaining to the theatre which was aimed at the juvenile market.

In this paper, following a midrange methodology that combines insights from narrative theory with human and machine reading, we gather data from fifty domestic realist novels. We find that while the average mid-Victorian family hovered just below six children, the average family in the Victorian novel has 2.8 children, and more than a third are only children. Novelists responded to the demands of the narrative when constructing their sibling sets: certain quantities and gender configurations of siblings are wrought from formal necessity. We identify several patterns stemming from our data in the composition of the novelistic Victorian sibling set, including orphans, heiresses, brother-sister pairings, and the long family as a joke. We find that the Victorian novel's focus on lineage leads novelists to prune the long families of history quite aggressively, representing them vaguely if at all. We conclude by offering our methodology, which relies on a combination of minimal computing and close reading, as an example and provocation to scholars seeking to embark on more empirical projects, and to see familiar texts anew.

Through a sustained close reading of William Makepeace Thackeray's 1855 novel The Newcomes, this essay examines three analogous types of particularity in the novel: the particularity of loved ones in the social network, of fictional persons in the literary work, and of the individual text. Drawing on recent sociological and network readings of Victorian narrative, I argue that Thackeray's plot about relationships in the marriage market is reflected (on the level of form) by the structural relation between characters and text, and (on the level of the reading experience) by the affective engagement of the reader to the novel. As characters encounter problems in replacing old relations (former lovers, deceased spouses, estranged relatives) with new ones, the novel raises analogous questions about the replaceability of characters as textual constructs or fictional persons, and of the novel itself as one experience among multitudes on offer in the nineteenth-century market. A tension between the continual or particular experience of an individual novel and the felt historical pressure of novels en masse registers in the text itself as a formal and narrative problem, one that leads us suggestively toward recent methodological debates about intimate and distant reading.

The paper examines different degrees of the subjectivity of speakers who act respectively as a narrator, a character in the story, and the author in narrative fictions. According to the speaker’s four different cases of being on stage, off stage, whether serving as a reference point and cross-world identification, eight types of construal configurations of speaker’s subjectivity have been summarized. Findings show that the speaker is characterized to be maximally subjective when he/she is an author, and minimally subjective when he/she is a character in the story. The degree of speaker’s subjectivity is greater outside the story than that inside it, and it is also greater when he/she is being weakly perceived than that being strongly perceived. Overall, each configuration is a particular narrative strategy adopted by the author to achieve certain effects, and these configurations, to some extent, provide some cognitive interpretations for these achieved narrative effects.

What does Victorian studies look like from the vantage point of Pan-African anticolonialism? Writers like W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, C. L. R. James, and others frequently turned to Victorian texts in formulating their critiques of empire and race. And yet these thinkers have been almost completely overlooked by the field of Victorian studies. This essay argues for a return to Saidian contrapuntal reading as a way to introduce Pan-Africanism into the itinerary of the Victorian century.