Peter Ackroyd: The Ludic and Labyrinthine Text

Peter Ackroyd: the Ludic and Labyrinthine Text offers the reader the first major critical study in English of one of Britain's most inventive, playful and significant writers of the twentieth century. Attending to the contours of Ackroyd's rhetorical strategies, narrative structures and his self-conscious borrowing from other writers, this study playfully yet rigorously engages with questions of literary stylistics, pastiche and parody, humour and camp sensibility, memory and temporality, personal and national identity and, finally, the importance of London to Ackroyd's writing. Rejecting the postmodern label which previous critics have attached to the author, Jeremy Gibson and Julian Wolfreys depart from this understanding of Peter Ackroyd's work, to provide a thought-provoking consideration of all his writings to date, from his poetry and critical thought, to his novels and biographies, including Milton in America and The Life of Thomas More. This will be an indispensable study for anyone interested in Ackroyd, in literary stylistics, and in the condition of the novel at the end of the twentieth century.

Table of Contents:
Abbreviations Foreword by Peter Nichols Acknowledgements Introduction: The 'Ludicrous' Text of Peter Ackroyd 'A Tiny Light/Seen in the Mind's Eye as a Phoneme': The Poetry 'A Bit of a Game': The Styles of Peter Ackroyd I: The Great Fire of London, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, Hawksmoor 'A Bit of a Game': The Styles of Peter Ackroyd II: Chatterton, English Music, First Light, Milton in America 'Endless Variety': Writing the City in the Biographies, The House of Doctor Dee, and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem Three Interviews with Peter Ackroyd: 26th August, 1989, 4th January, 1995 and 21st December, 1997 Works Cited Index

About the Author :
JEREMY GIBSON was born in Crawley, West Sussex in 1967. He obtained his Doctorate at the University of Sussex. In 1995 he joined the Higher Education Quality Council. Jeremy died in the autumn of 1996, as the result of a cycling accident. JULIAN WOLFREYS is Associate Professor in the Department of English, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Florida, Gainesville. He is the editor of numerous books and has also written Being English: Narratives, Idioms and Performances of National Identity from Coleridge to Trollope (1994), The Rhetoric of Affirmative Resistances: Dissonant Identities from Carroll to Derrida (1997), Deconstruction - Derrida (1998), and Writing London: the Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens (1998).

Review :
'The Laughter of Peter Ackroyd - no, this is not a novel by Agatha Christie, it is just what this exhilarating and brilliant book by two critics, one deceased, the other alive, and who never met, will make you hear: a polyphonic and polymorphous perverse laughter that keeps resounding in the ludic labyrinth of our libraries. Jeremy Gibson and Julian Wolfreys lead us in and out of this enjoyable maze by writing definitive autotextography of the most gifted literary murderer and resurrectionist of today.' - Jean-Michel Rabate, Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania 'Julian Wolfreys and Jeremy Gibson provide readers with the kind of original and far-reaching criticism that Peter Ackroyd's oeuvre has always deserved. Innovative and thought-provoking, this insightful volume should inspire a new scholarly appreciation for Ackroyd's considerable artistic accomplishments.' - Kenneth Womack, Professor of English, Pennsylvania State University 'Much like Ackroyd's novels, Peter Ackroyd becomes a moving and entertaining conversation which readers will want to join in with...' - Jenny Bavidge, University of Greenwich, MLR