Peter Ackroyd's novels and biographies have consistently hovered on the boundaries of conventional literary form. While his historical novels characteristically assume the disguise of an imaginary journal or confessional narrative presented as a...
"Biographers are simply novelists without imagination": in one of the fanciful interchapters of his biography Dickens (1990), Peter Ackroyd imagines hearing this sentiment from Charles Dickens. The statement illuminates the challenge biography holds...
Peter Ackroyd (born October 5 1949, London) is an English author. Ackroyd has always shown a great interest in the city of London and one of his most recent works, London: The Biography, is an extensive and thorough discussion of London through the...
CHATTERTON, by Peter Ackroyd. Grove Press, 234 pp., $17.95 Peter Ackroyd's novel centering on Thomas Chatterton, the adolescent poet and forger, concerns, in a sense, death and resurrection -- Chatterton lives again through Henry Wallis' 1856 portrait in which George Meredith modeled as the...
. . .ARE YOU READING NOW? AT THE moment I am reading a life of William Shakespeare, Ungentle Shakespeare by Katherine Duncan-Jones (Arden, pound sterling7.99). I am planning to write my own biography next year. He is also one of the figures celebrated...
If book publishing is a horse race, this fall we’re being treated to a Nobel trifecta. In September, we have Slow Man (Viking), a bag of tricks from the newest laureate, J.M. Coetzee (b. 1940); in October, Memories of My Melancholy Whores (Knopf), a typically...
If book publishing is a horse race, this fall we’re being treated to a Nobel trifecta. In September, we have Slow Man (Viking), a bag of tricks from the newest laureate, J.M. Coetzee (b. 1940); in October, Memories of My Melancholy Whores (Knopf), a typically...
In the following essay, Finney provides an overview of Ackroyd's theoretical development and postmodern perspective—particularly his view of history, language, and authenticity, as revealed in his biographical works and fiction, notably Chatterton.
In the following essay, Peck provides an overview of the major literary themes and postmodern narrative effects in Ackroyd's fiction, including extended analysis of Hawksmoor, Chatterton, and First Light. Peck offers an unfavorable assessment of English Music and contends that First Light represents Ackroyd's most challenging novel to date.
