Peter Ackroyd
Peter Ackroyd (*1949 in London) was literary editor of The Spectator and is now chief book reviewer of The Times. He has published four books of poetry (incl. The Diversions of Purley). His non-fiction works include Ezra Pound and His World and biographies of T.S. Eliot, Charles Dickens and William Blake.
"[I]t is as a novelist with a preoccupation with the circular nature of time that Ackroyd has now become best known. All his novels explore, in their various ways, active relationships between the present and the historical past through narratives that subvert the distinction between invention and authenticity. In his first novel, The Great Fire of London (1982), the relationship focuses on a plan to film Dickens' Little Dorrit. London has continued to loom large in Ackroyd's fiction, both as a physical location (especially its more sinister side) and as a metaphor. His gift for historical reconstruction was demonstrated in The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), in which Wilde looks back on his life from his last years of poverty and exile in Paris. Hawksmoor (1985) (...) has Detective Nicholas Hawksmoor (namesake of the 18th-cent. Architect) investigating a series of murders in London churches that become linked to the rebuilding of the city after the Great Fire of 1666. In Chatterton (1987) a similar historical dynamic is set up, with modern events being related back to the death of the poet Thomas Chatterton and the marriage of the Victorian writer George Meredith, while in First Light (1989) an archeological discovery provides the link between past and present. Ackroyd's blending of genres continued in the visionary autobiography English Music (1992), a series of lyrical dialogues on English culture, and in The House of Doctor Dee (1993), in which the central character, Matthew Palmer, inherits an old house in Clerkenwell formerly the residence of the 16th-cent. magician John Dee. Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994), set in 1880 and centring on a series of grisly murders in the East End of London, brings together the music-hall performer Dan Leno, Charles Babbage (inventor of the Analytical Engine, a proto-computer), and the novelist George Gissing in a characteristic commingling of genres and narrative voices." (Oxford Companion to English Literature, p. 4-5)
Chatterton
Genre: fictitious metabiography/(postmodern) metahistorical novel
Narrative situation: various. Figural narrative situation is dominant; on level 3 alternation between autodiegetic and authorial n. s./1 focalizer
Characters: Charles Wychwood, Edward Wychwood, Philip Slack; Henry Wallis, George Meredith; Thomas Chatterton
Ackroyd combines elements of historical novel and biography; he draws on the tradition of the detective, gothic and 'artist novel'. There is also a postmodern play with texts (the postmoderrn view is that there is nothing beyond it). Three narrative situations correspond to three time levels, three layers of the story continually intersect.
The ultimate consequence of simultaneity is a denial of history, of progress, and of change (which is why the critical left have objections to Ackroyd's work).
In order to find out more about Peter Ackroyd try the following links:
http://ethesis.helsinki.fi/julkaisut/hum/engla/pg/hanninen/index.html - Rewriting Literary History: Peter Ackroyd and Intertextuality. Ukko Hänninen, Master's thesis, June 1997. University of Helsinki, Faculty of Arts, Department of English.
pic: http://www.thesusijnagency.com/authors/ackroyd.htm
Sources:
Ackroyd, Peter. Introduction. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Harmondsworth, Eng. : Penguin, 1985.
Finney, Brian. "Peter Ackroyd, Postmodernist Play and Chatterton." Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal, Albany, NY. 1992 Summer, 38:2, 240-61
Gregson, Ian. "Epigraphs for Epigones: John Ashbery's Influence in England." Bete Boire, Hull, Humberside, England. 1987 Winter, 4, 89-94
Herman, Luc. "The Relevance of History: Der Zauberbaum (1985) by Peter Sloterdijk and Hawksmoor (1985) by Peter Ackroyd." History and Post-War Writing. eds. Theo D'Haen and Hans Bertens. Amsterdam : Rodopi, 1990.
Hotho Jackson, Sabine. "Literary History in Literature: An Aspect of the Contemporary Novel." Moderna Sprak, Visingso, Sweden. 1992, 86:2, 113-19
Kendrick, Walter. "Vast Mmaster: Peter Ackroyd's Tales from the Crypt." Village Voice Lit. Supp. 1989 Sept., 78, 23-24
Lindop, Grevel. "The Empty Telephone Boys." PN-Review, Manchester, England. 1989, 15:6 (68), 43-46
McGrath, Patrick. "Peter Ackroyd." Bomb 1988-1989 Winter, 26, 44-47
Peck, John. "The Novels of Peter Ackroyd." English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature, Lisse, Netherlands. 1994 Sept, 75:5, 442-52
P.E.N New Fiction / London ; New York : Quartet Books, 1984. 246 p.
Onega-Jaen, Susana. "Pattern and Magic in Hawksmoor." Atlantis: Revista de la Asociacion Espanola de Estudios Anglo Norteamericanos, La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain. 1991 Nov, 12:2, 31-43
Yardi, Anjali. "New View of Colonialism." The Indian-P.E.N.., Bombay, India. 1990 Oct.-Dec., 51:10-12, 9-11
