‘Romantic Novels 1817’ Seminar Series, University of Greenwich

The second ‘Romantic Novels 1817’ session will take place on Friday, 10 March 2017, at 6pm, with Dr. Freya Johnston (Oxford) leading us through a discussion of Thomas Love Peacock’s Melincourt.  This session will take place at the University of Greenwich, in Queen Anne Court (marked ‘2’ on the map), Room 063 (a slight change from our first session).  See link to campus map here: http://www2.gre.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/465729/Greenwich.pdf.

Melincourt, Thomas Love Peacock’s well-received second novel is a vibrant satire of opinion, with a wide gallery of characters and a sophisticated armoury of stylistic and comic tools at its disposal. Female novelists, female dialogue, and female education all feature prominently, while the greatest joke in this novel of talk is that the hero, a chivalric orang-outang who strides triumphantly across a scene of human degeneracy, cannot speak at all.

Freya Johnston is a fellow and lecturer in English at St Anne’s College, Oxford. She is general editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Thomas Love Peacock (2016-) and volume co-editor of his sixth novel, Crotchet Castle (2016).

A note on editions: Melincourt can be tricky to get hold of, even second-hand or online. In case anyone has difficulties tracking it down, there is a decent version of the whole novel available on google books here:

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Pbo-AAAAYAAJ&dq=Melincourt%20contents%20page&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

The session is free and open to the public.  Details of further sessions can be found on the attached poster.  If you’d like to be placed on our mailing list, email us at [email protected] or follow us on twitter @reading1817.

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