The Edged Coins Can Smart: Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan and the Semiotics of Late Modernism
Date of Graduation
Spring 2007
Degree
Master of Arts in English
Department
English
Committee Chair
William Burling
Abstract
Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan (1946) is one of the most neglected British fantasy novels of the 20th century. By way of the interpretive methodologies of A.J. Greimas and Fredric Jameson, this thesis argues that Titus Groan represents Peake's meditation on the problems of artistic production in late modernism, and accordingly portrays those contradictions inherent to production under late capital. Unsatisfied with the commodity status of art in the culture industry, Peake symbolically explores the complex mediations between reified commodity culture and artistic production. Additionally unsatisfied with the anachronistic patronage models of earlier modernists, Peake's novel simultaneously disallows any consideration of art as commodity. Thus, Titus Groan is situated in the dialectics of Modernist aesthetics and founds a tradition of British fantasy other than that of Tolkien and Lewis, a trajectory embodied in the postmodern fantasies of M. John Harrison and China Miéville.
Keywords
fantasy, British novels, Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake, late modernism, twentieth-century fiction, twentieth-century novels, Gormenghast, semiotic square
Subject Categories
English Language and Literature
Copyright
© Carl A. Stewart
Recommended Citation
Stewart, Carl A., "The Edged Coins Can Smart: Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan and the Semiotics of Late Modernism" (2007). MSU Graduate Theses. 2295.
https://bearworks.missouristate.edu/theses/2295
Dissertation/Thesis
