Thomas Love Peacock (1785‒1866) is one of the most distinctive prose satirists of the Romantic period. The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock offers the first complete text of these works to appear for more than half a century. Headlong Hall (1816), Peacock's earliest work of dialogic and satirical fiction, was the most popular of his tales during his lifetime and considered his signature novel. An episodic plot and a country house setting provide the framework for a sparkling intellectual comedy that embraces music, gastronomy, philosophy, politics, craniology, painting, and landscape gardening. This edition supplies an authoritative text and a comprehensive introduction tracing the genesis, composition, publication, reception, and revision of the novel. Extensive explanatory notes throw light on the Welsh backdrop to the fiction as well as on the literary, political, social, and intellectual contexts of Peacock's innovative topical satire.
Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) is one of the most distinctive prose satirists of the Romantic period. The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock offers the first complete text of his novels to appear for more than half a century. Nightmare Abbey (1818), Peacock's third novel, is a spirited satire that shows Peacock to be a perceptive observer and engaged critic of the literary and political preoccupations of his time. While the novel has often been characterized in popular culture either as a burlesque of the Gothic novel or a mere spoof of Romantic gloom and doom, this edition recognizes it as a purposeful critique of Romanticism. Explanatory notes illustrate the ways in which several characters are caricatures of prominent Romantic writers, including Peacock's close friend Shelley as well as Coleridge and Byron, and also identify the various sources, some previously unsuspected, from which Peacock created their dialogue.
Melincourt (1817), Thomas Love Peacock's only three-volume novel, is also his most comprehensive work. In it, he explores a broad range of controversies: the dangers of 'paper money'; British consumers' complicity in slavery; the inequities of the current system of parliamentary representation; the problem of differentiating between human beings and other animals; and, most centrally, the question of whether and how the human condition might be improved. Peacock's brilliant synthesis of courtship novel and quest romance can only be fully appreciated against its colourful and fraught historical background, and Gary Dyer expertly equips readers with the historical and literary awareness required to recognise it as one of Peacock's most stimulating works. Vividly illuminating its remarkable plot – from the suitors' courtship of Anthelia Melincourt to the rescue party comprised of Sylvan Forester, Mr Fax and the chivalrous 'oran outang' Sir Oran Haut-ton – this edition makes Melincourt
Thomas Love Peacock (1785‒1866) is one of the most distinctive prose satirists of the Romantic period. The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock offers the first complete text of his novels to appear for more than half a century. Crotchet Castle (1831), his sixth novel, contains all the humour and social satire for which Peacock is famous. Its lively farce is more ambitious than that of the earlier works in its range of cultural and intellectual targets, including progressivism, dogmatism, liberalism, sexism, mass education and the idiocies of the learned. The book constitutes an artistic, political and philosophical miscellany of sorts, thematically unified in its satirical emphasis on folly and dispute – and on the folly of dispute itself. This edition provides a full introduction, chronology, annotations and detailed textual and scholarly apparatus.
The seventh and final novel of Thomas Love Peacock followed the others after a silence of?30 years, its typical Peacockian format intact: an idyllic, country house setting, a genial host, many opinion
This 1818 novel is set in a former abbey whose owner, Christopher Glowry, is host to visitors who enjoy his hospitality and engage in endless debate. Among these guests are figures recognizable to Pea
