Peter Ackroyd (Writers and Their Work)

Peter Ackroyd (b. 1947) in internationally celebrated as a novelist and also well known as poet, biographer and reviewer. He came to public notice after the publication of his award-winning novel, Hawksmoor (1985), a thrilling historiographic metafiction that combines the horror of an 18th-century gothic tale of ritual murder with the suspense of a 20th-century detective story. A most versatile and prolific writer, Ackroyd sees his different writing activities as part of the same overall attempt to revitalise the English cultural tradition. In the first book-length study to date, Susana Onega’s assessment of Ackroyd’s literary identify treads the entire range of his writings. Topics covered by the book include Ackroyd’s fictional treatment of London, his recovery of the English Catholic cultural tradition; his self-conscious re-writing of history; and the way in which the multilayered interplay of form and meaning in the novels works to enhance the fictionality of the created world while simultaneously suggesting a paradoxical yearning for mythical closure.