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Visual Thinking and the Picture Story in The History of Henry Esmond

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Robert P. Fletcher
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Abstract

This essay argues that Thackeray's unillustrated three-volume novel The History of Henry Esmond is shaped by modes of perception and representation nascent in the visual culture of nineteenth-century England and epitomized in the comic strip. Through one of Thackeray's own picture stories, it first describes the ekphrastic basis of his narrative imagination and then contextualizes his visual thinking by relating his journalistic reflections on images in society to recent cultural histories of visual experience. Subsequently, the essay demonstrates that Henry Esmond, a seemingly monumental historical novel, is structured by the fractured syntax of the comic picture story and that the picture story's revisionist impulse decenters the autobiographical subject, Henry Esmond, and highlights the heuristic function of his narrative. The argument concludes by revisiting Thackeray's meditations on the picture story, the railroad, and modernity, suggesting that his texts—both picture stories and this bildungsroman—foreground a transformative vision and thus reveal the contingency of subjectivity.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 113 , Issue 3 , May 1998 , pp. 379 - 394
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1998

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