Thackeray's skeptical narrative and the "perilous trade" of authorship

Drawing on the rhetorical work of James Phelan, Wayne Booth's ethical criticism, recent work on William Makepeace Thackeray, as well as an understanding of the role of skepticism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English thought, Thackeray's Skeptical Narrative and the Perilous Trade of Authorship makes a substantial contribution to nineteenth-century reading practices, as well as narratology in general.

Judith Fisher combines in this study rhetorical and ethical analysis of Thackeray's narrative techniques to trace how his fiction develops to educate his reader into what she terms a hermeneutic of skepticism.

This is a kind of poised reading which enables his readers to integrate his fiction into their life in what Thackeray called a world without God without becoming pessimistic or fatalistic.