Metafiction and myth in the novels of Peter Ackroyd

What is it about?

This is an in-depth study of the nine novels written by Peter Ackroyd before 1998, with side glances at the poetry, the biographies and other non-fictional works. The study highlights Ackroyd’s central position as a practitioner of historiographic metafiction in England and his singular contribution to the development of literary postmodernism. At the same time the study shows how, for all its display of postmodernist self-reflexivity and experimentalism, much of Ackroyd’s fiction really becomes understandable only in the light of a range of esoteric and mythical ideas with clear roots in the English visionary tradition.

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Why is it important?

This book places Peter Ackroyd in the context of the generation of visionary London writers that emerged in the 1980s. It shows the way in which his fictional works combine intertextual echoes of visionary writers like William Blake and Modernist writers like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and moves forward towards a postmodernist postion.

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