Nightmare Abbey

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.

“'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”

'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

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).

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