"The mystical city universal": representations of London in Peter Ackroyd's fiction

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2007

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Sağlam, Berkem Gürenci

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Most of Peter Ackroyd’s work takes place in London, and the city can be said to be a unifying element in his work. Even those of his novels that do not use London as a setting are about London and Londoners, in history and in the present. London, in Ackroyd’s work, is represented by multiple points of view firstly that of a historical personage and secondly of a researcher in the present day. Through the use of such a structure, Ackroyd parodies biography writing (by rewriting and distorting the life of a historical Londoner), and detective fiction (by making the contemporary researcher ineffectual and underqualified). These narratives, while being clearly separate and linear in themselves, focus on London, which acts as a bridge between the characters and themes in the separate centuries, culminating in their merge at the end. Thus, methods of rewriting in Ackroyd’s work come together in the ulterior aim of rewriting the city of London. The main aim of this dissertation is to account for the various types of rewriting and parody that becomes evident in Ackroyd’s fiction. In the light of the discussions on parody of detective fiction and biography in each chapter, this dissertation will attempt to view Ackroyd’s fiction as a chronological metamorphosis of London itself, through rewriting its artists and their texts as productions of London.

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English literature.

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http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12608970/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/17165

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

B. G. Sağlam, ““The mystical city universal”: representations of London in Peter Ackroyd’s fiction,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2007.