Works
Peacock's own place in literature is pre-eminently that of a satirist. That he has nevertheless been the favourite only of the few is owing partly to the highly intellectual quality of his work, but mainly to his lack of ordinary qualifications of the novelist, all pretension to which he entirely disclaims. He has no plot, little human interest, and no consistent delineation of character. His personages are mere puppets, or, at best, incarnations of abstract qualities such as grace or beauty, but beautifully depicted.
His comedy combines the mock-Gothic with the Aristophanic. He suffers from that dramatist's faults and, though not as daring in invention or as free in the use of sexual humour, shares many of his strengths. His greatest intellectual love is for Ancient Greece, including late and minor works such as the Dionysiaca of Nonnus; many of his characters are given punning names taken from Greek to indicate their personality or philosophy.
He tended to dramatize where traditional novelists narrated; he is more concerned with the interplay of ideas and opinions than of feelings and emotions; his dramatis personae is more likely to consist of a cast of more or less equal characters than of one outstanding hero or heroine and a host of minor auxiliaries; his novels have a tendency to approximate the Classical unities, with few changes of scene and few if any subplots; his novels are novels of conversation rather than novels of action; in fact, Peacock is so much more interested in what his characters say to one another than in what they do to one another that he often sets out entire chapters of his novels in dialogue form. Plato's Symposium is the literary ancestor of these works, by way of the Deipnosophists of Athenaeus, in which (as in much of Peacock) the conversation relates less to exalted philosophical themes than to the points of a good fish dinner.
Read more about this topic: Thomas Love Peacock
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“The works of women are symbolical.
We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,
Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,
To put on when you’re weary or a stool
To stumble over and vex you ... “curse that stool!”
Or else at best, a cushion, where you lean
And sleep, and dream of something we are not,
But would be for your sake. Alas, alas!
This hurts most, this ... that, after all, we are paid
The worth of our work, perhaps.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
“The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.”
—Freya Stark (b. 1893–1993)
“...A shadow now occasionally crossed my simple, sanguine, and life enjoying mind, a notion that I was never really going to accomplish those powerful literary works which would blow a noble trumpet to social generosity and noblesse oblige before the world. What? should I find myself always planning and never achieving ... a richly complicated and yet firmly unified novel?”
—Sarah N. Cleghorn (1876–1959)