The Living Presence of Invisible Agencies and Unseen Powers – The Dramatised and Reinvented History of Peter Ackroyd’s Novels
Keywords:
Peter Ackroyd, heterogeneity, historiographic metafiction, pastiche, palimpsest, alternate historyAbstract
The voluminous body of work of Peter Ackroyd, one of the most versatile contemporary British writers, comprises chiefly of non-fiction and fiction. The first is dominated by his books on English history, English literature, the history and development of London, and a series of biographies of outstanding personalities he labels “Cockney Visionaries”, the latter by his novels. Taking some of the recent tendencies in historical fiction as a frame of reference and focusing on Ackroyd’s novels set solely in the past and both in the past and the present, this article examines how the various sides of his professional self – an historian, literary historian, biographer and writer – combine and intersect in his rendering and re-enacting history as a lively material and inheritance that can still be palpable in and illuminating for our present experience.
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