Onega Susana. Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd

Camden House, 1999. — 214 p.In the first full-length study of highly acclaimed English writer Peter Ackroyd's nine novels to date, Susana Onega analyses in depth their recurrent structural and thematic traits, showing how they grow out of the tension createdby two apparently contradictory tendencies. On the one hand there is Ackroyd's metafictional tendency to blur the boundaries between story-telling and history; to emphasize the linguistic component of writing; and to underline the constructedness of the world in a way that aligns Ackroyd with other postmodernist writers of what Linda Hutcheon has termed "historiographic metafiction." And on the other hand there is Ackroyd's attempt to achieve mythical closure, expressed, for example, in his fictional treatment of London as a mystic center of power. This mythical element evinces the influence of high modernists like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, and links Ackroyd's work to transition-to-postmodernism writers, such as Lawrence Durrell, Maureen Duffy, Doris Lessing or John Fowles.