The Voice of the Heart
The Working of Mervyn Peake's Imagination
Distributed for Liverpool University Press
224 pages
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50 halftones
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6 x 9
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© 2006
The profoundly creative works of Mervyn Peake have fascinated readers for decades. His Gormenghast sequence of novels, recently serialized to great acclaim by the BBC, stands as one of the great imaginative accomplishments of twentieth-century literature.
In The Voice of the Heart, G. Peter Winnington, the world’s foremost expert on Peake, explores his subject’s well-known fiction alongside the poetry, plays, and illustrations for which Peake is equally lauded. He traces recurrent motifs through Peake’s works and examines in detail his long-neglected play, The Wit to Woo. Through close readings of all these elements of Peake’s oeuvre, Winnington ultimately offers unparalleled insight into one of British literature’s most vibrant imaginations.
In The Voice of the Heart, G. Peter Winnington, the world’s foremost expert on Peake, explores his subject’s well-known fiction alongside the poetry, plays, and illustrations for which Peake is equally lauded. He traces recurrent motifs through Peake’s works and examines in detail his long-neglected play, The Wit to Woo. Through close readings of all these elements of Peake’s oeuvre, Winnington ultimately offers unparalleled insight into one of British literature’s most vibrant imaginations.
Tom Shippey, professor of Humanities, St. Louis University
"Peter Winnington's The Voice of the Heart is the first study to take in Peake's entire multi-generic work as a whole, and treats it with engagingly new and individual approaches. Peake has at last received the focused and undistracted attention he above all requires."
Sebastian Peake | Mervyn Peake Blog
"A very welcome and highly illuminating addition to an ever-growing biographical canon. . . .In the most perceptive and gently probing of ways he eloquently deconstructs these and other areas in which the artist worked, in such a way that rather than dry academic analysis or clear-headed intellectual rationalism, a tone which would have completely misjudged the nature of the subject, the reader is guided by an expert to both the heart of the matter, and the heart of the man. . . . Winnington's critical monograph is required reading for those interested in knowing more about the subject, and in this handsome Liverpool University Press publication they will certainly have a chance to do just that."
Jeff Bursey | Books in Canada
"With rewarding concentration, Winnington plumbs the depths in Peake's writing, and it would be fair to say that some of these depths once looked like fairly shallow pools. They can't be regarded as such any more. . . . By cross-stitching commentary, weaving drawings and writing together, Winnington, using plain, unencumbered prose, shows how Peake explored certain themes with the hunger and ache of an obsessive. The Voice of the Heart turns inside out Peake's use of symbols and motifs, among them solitude, isolation, identity, and perspective. Until now, no one has written such an explication; it is bound to open up rewarding avenues for further scholarly work. . . . A critical book that is both respectful of its subject and audience, as well as enthusiastic about the author under discussion, is a rare thing. It's well past time that Peak received such treatment."
For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
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Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature
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