Resultaten voor 'thomas love peacock'

1. Thomas Love , Peacock

Nightmare Abbey

Nightmare Abbey (1818) is Thomas Love Peacock's brilliant satirical fiction set in a decaying Gothic mansion where Christopher Glowry and his son Scythrop brood amid fashionable despair. Through brisk dialogue, comic set pieces, and learned allusion, Peacock mocks the early nineteenth-century cult of melancholy, the excesses of Gothic romance, and the radical idealism of the younger Romantics. Its elegant, epigrammatic style places it between the philosophical novel of ideas and the comedy of manners, while its caricatures of Byron, Coleridge, and Shelley make it a sharp intervention in Regency literary culture. Peacock, a classical scholar, civil servant, and intimate friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote from close observation of the intellectual circles he parodied. His skepticism toward systems-political, metaphysical, and sentimental-was tempered by affection for wit, conversation, and humane common sense. Nightmare Abbey reflects both his erudition and his resistance to what he saw as Romantic self-dramatization. This compact novel is recommended to readers interested in satire, Romanticism, and the history of literary quarrels. It rewards those who enjoy comedy sharpened by learning, and it remains an unusually lively guide to an age intoxicated with gloom.