Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd

by Susana Ónega

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.

190 pages, Hardcover

Published March 1, 1999

About the author

Susana Onega is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Zaragoza and a member of the Academia Europaea. She has written extensively on contemporary British literature, narrative poetics, ethics and trauma.

Reviews

[Khanim Garayeva · Rating 5 out of 5]

As an author of several works on and interviews with Peter Ackroyd’s activity, Susana Onega is analysing Ackroyd’s nine novels which include my three primary sources as well. Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd helped me immensely in the identification of the mythical nature of the metafiction of the novels I study. The cyclical pattern of the happenings and their esoterically thematised traits create a meta-text not only in the textual level of the novel but from the author’s perspective towards the reader. Also, by adding a self-conscious and parodic level of history and literature at the same status of the human construct, Onega shows how Ackroyd’s novel perfectly fit into the frames of historiographic metafiction by blurring the distinctive line between the past and present. He uses the fragmentary perception of history, literature and culture of the past and their organisation into an overall patterns that helps to reveal the glimpses of a transcendental sublime Truth. Yet, they differ from his contemporary writers in the same style; Ackroyd’s historiographic metafictional novels reflect certain features of English sensibility that is specific only for him.