| The first three chapters situate the origin of the literary sketch in the age of Sterne, analyze its affinities with British empirical philosophy (that of Hume in particular), and trace the further development of the fictional and travel sketch in the nineteenth century as a form that remains predominantly empirical (that is, nominalist, inductive, and skeptical) but is now, after Kant and romanticism, nostalgic as well. The fourth chapter is a reading of the idea of the sketch in Thackeray's The Irish Sketch Book, Vanity Fair, and The Newcomes. In particular I explicate the early subtitle of Vanity Fair, "Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society," which few critics have discussed, and in my reading of The Newcomes establish the sketch as the medium of literary Bohemia. |
