Headlong Hall

by Thomas Love Peacock

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789359881614
Publisher:	True Sign Publishing House
Publication date:	05/09/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	276 KB

About the Author

Nicholas A. Joukovsky is an Emeritus Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. He has previously edited The Letters of Thomas Love Peacock, 2 vols. (2001), and Nightmare Abbey, volume 3 of The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock (Cambridge, 2016).

Table of Contents

General Editor's preface; Chronology; Introduction; Headlong Hall; Appendix A. Peacock's Preface of 1837; Appendix B. The Dilettanti (1812–13); Appendix C. The Three Doctors (1812–13); Appendix D. A Revised Text of the Headlong 'Chorus'; Note on the text; Emendations and variants; Ambiguous line-end hyphenations; Explanatory notes; Select bibliography.

Editorial Reviews

‘With their meticulous notes, rigorous documentation of textual variants and generous contextual appendices (including two unperformed, unpublished farces that Peacock drew on for Headlong Hall), these fine new volumes in the Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock get us closer than ever to the nuances of his satire.’ Thomas Keymer, the Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher

As for having characters lecture on life, what a vice it is! And always unsatisfactory, even in the hands of Dr. Mann. Peacock and the early Huxley did it best...

THE NEW YORKER