000			01606nam a2200169Ia 4500
020			_a‎ 0140620850
040			_cPKLaCSN
082			_a820 _bTHA-V
100			_aThackeray, makepeace william
245		0	_aVanity Fair
260			_c1994 _bPenguin Popular Classics; _aLondon
300			_a688
520			_a"Vanity Fair", Thackeray's panoramic, satirical saga of corruption at all levels of English society, was published in 1847 but set during the Napoleonic Wars. It chronicles the lives of two women who could not be more different: Becky Sharp, an orphan whose only resources are her vast ambitions, her native wit, and her loose morals; and her schoolmate Amelia Sedley, a typically naive Victorian heroine, the pampered daughter of a wealthy family. Becky's fluctuating fortunes eventually bring her to an affair with Amelia's dissolute husband; When he is killed at Waterloo, Amelia and her child are left penniless, while Becky and her husband Rawdon Crawley rise in the world, managing to lead a high life in London solely on the basis of their shrewdness. The chapter titled 'How to Live on Nothing' is a classic. Thackeray's subtitle, "A Novel Without a Hero", is understating the case; his view of humanity in this novel is distinctly bleak and deliberately antiheroic. Critics of the time misunderstood the book, decrying it as (among other things) vicious, vile, and odious. But "Vanity Fair" has endured as one of the great comic novels of all time, and a landmark in the history of realism in fiction.
942			_cTB
999			_c852405 _d852382