Kenneally is by no means uncritical of O’Casey as man and writer. At one point there is reference to “vindictive, petty and uncharitable” sides to his personality; in another context it is said that “O’Casey’s failure to strike an appropriate tone, his unwillingness to lend a sense of proportion to his criticism of people or institutions, and his inability to recognize that the expenditure of such energy was often unwarranted reveal him, at times, as vindictive and mean-spirited, at others, as overly-sensitive and idealistic.” The critic’s appreciation of the autobiographer’s creative vitality and life long commitment to idealistic causes, however, is persuasively presented as well. In particular, the fine chapter on “Literary Images and Auto biographical Identity” convincingly shows how, throughout the narrative, the essential traits of O’Casey’s character — “his passionate convictions, his stubborn refusal to compromise his integrity, and his outspoken and vehement expression of his views — often conspire to estrange him from those round him whenever the circumstances of his life have not already done so.” Implicitly, Kenneally shows something of the heroic quality that underlies O’Casey’s “dogged determination to achieve personal liberation and individual fulfilment through self-education,” despite appalling adver sities. Defining the “essential principles” which determined the dramatist’s approach to past experiences, Kenneally demonstrates O’Casey’s “impres sive achievements as an autobiographer,” going on to show that, as “an imaginative response to personal history,” drawing upon a host of literary devices and narrative techniques, “the six-volume autobiography stands as a complex and challenging work of self-portrayal.” With its many means of “depicting an evolving series of former selves, of presenting the individual developing as a result of successive encounters with the people and events of his historical reality, and with its passionate expression of a deeply held view of life, the work provides a vivid, indelible and comprehensive portrait of its author.” By the close, Kenneally’s contention that “few autobiographers since Rousseau have explored as many facets of their lives as O’Casey does” has been triumphantly realized during the course of a definitive exposition of many aspects of that exploration. r o n a l d a y l i n g / University of Alberta James Mulvihill, Thomas Love Peacock (Boston: Twayne, 1987). viii, 125. Like Leigh Hunt, Thomas Moore, and John Clare, Thomas Love Peacock is one of those literary figures of the English Romantic era who remains marginalized from the Romantic canon. Despite his obvious intelligence i n and powers of articulation, and despite being at the right place at the right time with the right people, he is perhaps best known for his portrayals of the other “great” Romantics, and for supplying The Four Ages of Poetry (1820) as ostensible material for Percy Bysshe Shelley to write against, the result being one of the most important literary documents of the age — Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry. Peacock was born in 1785 in Dorsetshire. Little is known about his up bringing and childhood, except that he was good at school. He left school as a young teenager to become a clerk in London, but he none the less managed to educate himself in classical literature ( “Greeky-Peeky” was to become his nickname). When he was just over twenty he published a vol ume of poetry, and within six years he published two more unremarkable volumes. At about this time he met Shelley and became friend, correspon dent, and eventual biographer of his younger contemporary. As a result of Shelley’s interests and connections, Peacock published three conversational novels between 1816-1818 which satirized contemporary literary figures and humorously explored the various philosophical positions circulating among the striving literati of the middle classes. From 1819 until his retirement in 1856, he worked for the East India Company. He married in 1820, and before his death at the age of eighty in 1866 he managed to publish four more novels as well as numerous reviews and a few essays. What’s of interest and importance to be said about Peacock? A more than fair amount has been written already, most of it recent, and while this may...