Miracle Enough

Papers on the Works of Mervyn Peake

Edited By: William Gray, Peter Winnington

£44.99

This is the first comparable collection of essays on Mervyn Peake ever published. Selected from an international conference, these papers by scholars and artists take a wide variety of approaches to his work—from the Gormenghast trilogy to his poetry and art.

To mark the centenary of Mervyn Peake’s birth, the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy (University of Chichester) organized an international conference in…

To mark the centenary of Mervyn Peake’s birth, the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy (University of Chichester) organized an international conference in July 2011 entitled “Mervyn Peake and the Fantasy Tradition.”

Papers were presented by scholars, artists, and writers from all over the world, and here we have a selection of them. No other comparable collection of essays on Peake has ever been published.

The contributors take a wide variety of approaches to Peake’s work – not just the Gormenghast trilogy but also his books for children, his poetry, and his art. They compare Peake with other writers, explore the world of Gormenghast, and examine his characters and his poetical prose style. Two essays approach the graphic side of Peake’s oeuvre: the drawings he made in the manuscripts of the Titus books, and his illustrations for Household Tales by the Brothers Grimm.

The book contains 60 illustrations and two tables.

Introduction by Professor William Gray, Director of the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy, University of Chichester; author of Death and Fantasy (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and Fantasy, Art and Life (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011).

The papers are edited by G. Peter Winnington, the leading Peake scholar who has penned both a biography – Mervyn Peake’s Vast Alchemies (Peter Owen, 2009) – and a critical study – The Voice of the Heart: The Working of Mervyn Peake’s Imagination (Liverpool University Press, 2006). He is the editor of Peake Studies and further books on Peake.