"Reality is the invention of unimaginative people” – the Counterfeiting and Imaginative London of Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton
Keywords:
London, the city, metafiction, intertextuality, forgery, imitation, imaginationAbstract
Peter Ackroyd’s most ambitious literary-historical project is to compose a biography of London, to reconstruct the city through the texts it has created, allowed to be created, incited or inspired. His fictional London, though always diverse and heterogeneous, has several idiosyncratic features such as intertextuality, metafiction, irrationality, supra-temporality and a focus on the unofficial or marginal aspects of its history. This article tries to explore the various roles of the city within the narrative and meaning structure of Chatterton (1987), arguably the author’s most metafictional novel to date. The article is especially interested in how the city is used to develop the novel’s arguments concerning the theme of the authenticity, originality, and ethical limits of artistic creation.
References
Ackroyd, Peter. Chatterton, New York: Grove Press, 1987.
Ackroyd, Peter. London: The Biography, New York: Anchor, 2003.
Ackroyd, Peter. Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, London: Vintage, 2004.
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” In Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (Third Edition), edited by David Lodge and Nigel Woods, Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd., 2008.
Bentley, Nick. British Fiction of the 1990s, London: Routledge, 2005.
Bradford, Richard. The Novel Now, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988.
Gibson, Jeremy, and Julian Wolfreys. Peter Ackroyd: The Ludic and Labyrinthine Text. London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 2000.
Kelly, Linda. The Marvellous Boy: The Life and Myth of Thomas Chatterton. London: Faber and Faber, 2008.
Lewis, Barry. My Words Echo Thus: Possessing the Past in Peter Ackroyd. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007.
Phillips, Lawrence. London Narratives: Post-War Fiction and the City. London: Continuum, 2011.
Sađlam, Berkem Gürenci.“The Mystical City Universal”: Representations of London in Peter Ackroyd’s Fiction, Ph.D. thesis, Middle East Technical University, 2007.
Onega, Susana. Peter Ackroyd, Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998.
Robinson, Alan, Narrating the Past: Historiography, Memory and the Contemporary Novel. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Woolf, Virginia. The London Scene, London: Snowbooks Ltd., 1975.
