The LRB Podcast26 Feb 2025

Close Readings: 'Crotchet Castle' by Thomas Love Peacock

Thomas Love Peacock didn’t want to write novels, at least not in the form they had taken in the first half of the 19th century. In Crotchet Castle he rejects the expectation that novelists should reveal the interiority of their characters, instead favouring the testing of opinions and ideas. His ‘novel of talk’, published in 1831, appears largely like a playscript in which disparate characters assemble for a house party next to the Thames before heading up the river to Wales. Their debates cover, among other things, the Captain Swing riots of 1830, the mass dissemination of knowledge, the emerging philosophy of utilitarianism and the relative merits of medieval and contemporary values. In this extended extract from 'Novel Approaches', a Close Readings series from the LRB, Clare Bucknell is joined by Freya Johnston and Thomas Keymer to discuss where the book came from and its use of ‘sociable argument’ to offer up-to-date commentary on the economic and political turmoil of its time. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Sponsored links: Use the code ‘LRB’ to get £150 off Serious Readers lights here: https://www.seriousreaders.com/lrb See A Knock on the Roof at the Royal Court Theatre: https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/a-knock-on-the-roof/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(458)

On Politics: The Andy Burnham Show

Andy Burnham will soon become the UK’s seventh prime minister since 2010 and will face many of the same problems that defeated his predecessors, not least the UK’s stubbornly weak economy. To dissect ...

1 Juli 1h 7min

Poetry and the Turning World: Weather

In Wordsworth’s 1807 description of ‘golden daffodils’, the breeze animates both the scene and the inner life of the speaker. Like many poets, Wordsworth turned to the weather to mediate between inter...

28 Juni 1h 14min

World Cup Cupidity

‘The beautiful game has never looked more beautiful on the pitch, or more ugly off it,’ Simon Skinner writes in the latest LRB. Each World Cup seems more tainted by corruption than the last, but is th...

24 Juni 51min

Poetry and the Turning World: Divorce

Poets have always written about love, but the divorce poem is a much more recent subgenre. In this episode, Sarah and Sandeep ask if the formal processes of legal separation can be successful material...

21 Juni 1h 18min

On Politics: What went wrong with HS2 (and almost everything else)

HS2 was conceived at a cost of £37.5 billion and originally supposed to link London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. It will now connect only two stations outside London and Birmingham at a projecte...

17 Juni 1h 4min

Poetry and the Turning World: Technology

When Robert Browning was asked to become the first poet to be recorded, on an Edison wax cylinder in 1889, he forgot his own poem. In the second episode of their series, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar ...

14 Juni 1h 30min

Poetry and the Turning World: Work

Is writing a poem work? In the first episode of their series exploring the ways in which poetry responds to our personal and collective challenges, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar start by considering t...

10 Juni 1h 4min

On Politics: Myths of Populism

The transformations of European politics over the past twenty years, including Britain’s vote to leave the EU and the rise of post-Soviet strongmen, are often explained as part of a ‘wave’ of populism...

3 Juni 1h 12min