Nightmare Abbey

by Thomas Love Peacock

Overview

Mr. Glowry was a very consolate widower with one small child. That child, a son, was named Scythrop after a maternal ancestor who had hanged himself one rainy day in a fit of tedium. The coroner's jury eulogized him and Mr. Glowry held his memory in high honor, and made a punchbowl of his skull.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393002836
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/17/1964
Pages:	100
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Nicholas A. Joukovsky is Emeritus Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. He is the editor of The Letters of Thomas Love Peacock (2001), has published widely on Romantic and Victorian writers, and has contributed the articles on Peacock for The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (3rd edition, Volume 4, 1999) and The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).

Table of Contents

General editor's preface; Chronology; Introduction; Nightmare Abbey; Appendix A. Peacock's Preface of 1837; Appendix B. An Essay on Fashionable Literature (1818); Appendix C. The Four Ages of Poetry (1820); Note on the text; List of emendations and variants; Ambiguous line-end hyphenations; Explanatory notes; Bibliography.

Editorial Reviews

'The idiosyncratic joy of Thomas Love Peacock’s works is highlighted within wonderfully readable scholarly introductions from Nicholas A. Joukovsky who edits Nightmare Abbey, and Freya Johnston and Matthew Bevis in their edition of Crotchet Castle. … the first thoroughly edited and annotated imprints of Peacock since the Halliford Edition of the Works, edited between 1924 and 1934 …' John Gardner, Notes and Queries

‘Readers are provided with all the information they need to understand and evaluate both the texts and the purposes underlying them … the editors have interpreted their brief generously. They have done an excellent job in identifying many 'out-of-the-way sources and analogues', as well as in positioning the texts accurately at a particular nineteenth-century cultural moment … this is likely to become the edition of choice for scholars and enthusiasts of Peacock’s novels, and for economists, historians, philosophers and other students of the changing currents of nineteenth-century intellectual culture. The volumes are beautifully produced.’ Pamela Clemit, Times Literary Supplement

‘… the first two volumes of the Cambridge Edition should become the new standard for editors of the Romantic novel. They not only perform the scholarly work of informing the reader of dates, circumstances, and variants, but they do what the best textual editing can: hugely enrich the experience of reading Nightmare Abbey and Crotchet Castle, and consequently enhance our sense of Peacock’s vigour, complexity, and wit.’ William Bowers, Keats-Shelley Journal

‘… [a] meticulous edition …’ Thomas Keymer, London Review of Books

‘Nightmare Abbey excels in tracking the composition through Spring 1818 … A variety of sources, including anecdotal evidence, are similarly used to recreate the immediate critical response … offering valuable commentary on prototypes of the novel’s satiric figures, generic and personal … In a final section on ‘Afterlife’, the editor convincingly attributes a shift in fortunes in the popularity of this title to the growth of English literature as an academic subject … a remarkable achievement in elucidating Peacock’s ‘fine wit’ for present and future readers.’ Peter Garside, Peacock edition

From the Publisher