Nightmare Abbey
The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock 7 Volume Set Series

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.

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.

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).