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Nightmare Abbey/Crotchet Castle - (Penguin Classics) by Thomas Love Peacock (Paperback)

Nightmare Abbey/Crotchet Castle - (Penguin Classics) by  Thomas Love Peacock (Paperback)
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Last Price: 16.99 USD

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<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br>Thomas Love Peacock is literature's perfect individualist. <p/> He has points in common with Aristophanes, Plato, Rabelais, Voltaire, and even Aldous Huxley, but resembles none of them; we can talk of the satirical novel of ideas, but his satire is too cheery and good-natured, his novel too rambling, and his ideas too jovially destructive for the label to stick. <p/>A romantic in his youth and a friend of Shelley, he happily made hay of the romantic movement in <i>Nightmare Abbey</i>, clamping Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley himself in a kind of painless pillory. And in <i>Crotchet Castle</i> he did no less for the political economists, pitting his gifts of exaggeration and ridicule against scientific progress and March of Mind. Yet the romantic in him never died: the long, witty, and indecisive talk of his characters is set in wild, natural scenery which Peacock describes with true feeling.<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br><b>Thomas Love Peacock</b> (1785-1866) was born in Weymouth, the son of a London merchant. His schooling ended before he was thirteen and he became a clerk in a City office in London while beginning a close study of French, Italian and English literature. He also published several volumes of minor poetry through which he made the acquaintance of Shelley, who was a close friend from 1812 until his death in 1822.<p>Peacock wrote his first novel, <b>Headlong Hall</b>, in 1815, starting the series of seven satirical novels on which his fame rests. <b>Melincourt </b>and <b>Nightmare Abbey</b>, a satire on 'black romanticism', followed in 1817 and 1818. In 1820 he married Jane Gryffydh and also wrote <b>The Four Ages of Poetry</b>, which baited Shelley to reply with his classic <b>Defense of Poetry</b>. Further novels, <b>Maid Marion </b>(1822), <b>The Misfortunes of Elphin </b>(1829), <b>Crochet Castle </b>(1831), a satire on political economy and the ideas of James Mill and Bentham, followed, but he was desperately grief-stricken by the death of his mother in 1833 and for the next twenty-five years wrote almost nothing, working with great diligence for the East India Company as an excellent administrator. His <b>Memoirs of Shelley </b>were published in 1858-62 and his last novel, <b>Gryll Grange</b>, in 1860. He retired in 1856 and lived as a recluse until his death.</p>

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