Title: My words echo thus : possessing the past in Peter Ackroyd /
Authors: Lewis, Barry, 1961-
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press,
Year: 2007
Subjects: Ackroyd, Peter, Criticism and interpretation.; Experimental fiction, English History and criticism
Abstract: "My Words Echo Thus is the first comprehensive evaluation of Peter Ackroyd's body of work, effectively bridging his novels, biographies, poems, and other writings to introduce readers to the fanciful premises, historical settings, and parallel tales that characterize this British writer's prodigious oeuvre. Employing a broadly intertextual perspective, Barry Lewis reveals how Ackroyd "possesses" the past like a medium, echoing its voices in his work." "Lewis outlines the early influences on Ackroyd's career, assesses each of his books chronologically, and surveys available criticism of the writer. By looking at Ackroyd's work in sequence, Lewis suggests, one can appreciate the synergy between novels that often feature biographical subjects and biographies that are "interanimated" through fictional techniques." "Placing each work in the larger mosaic of Ackroyd's career, Lewis explores the writer's thematic concerns, including London and Englishness, the tradition of Cockney visionaries, the Catholic legacy, the territorial imperative, the paradoxes of time, the continuity of the literary canon, and father-son relationships. Lewis also discusses the significance of the great writers who recur as touchstones throughout Ackroyd's work - William Shakespeare, William Blake, Charles Dickens, and T. S. Eliot."--BOOK JACKET.
Contents: Understanding Ackroyd -- Childhood, education, and career -- Identity -- Writings -- Poetry -- Notes for a new culture -- Journalism, lectures, and essays -- Dressing up, transvestism and drag -- Ezra Pound and his world -- The great fire of London -- The last testament of Oscar Wilde -- T.S. Eliot -- Hawksmoor -- Chatterton -- First light -- Dickens -- English music -- The house of Doctor Dee -- The trial of Elizabeth Cree -- Blake -- Milton in America -- The life of Thomas More -- The Plato papers -- London : the biography -- Albion -- The Clerkenwell tales -- Chaucer -- The Lambs of London -- Turner -- Shakespeare : the biography -- Ackroyd{u2019}s status as a writer -- Monographs about Ackroyd -- Ackroyd and his contemporaries -- Ackroyd and his predecessors -- Ackroyd as a postmodern writer -- Theories of postmodernism -- Hawksmoor and Chatterton as postmodernist fictions -- Hawksmoor and Chatterton as postmodernist detective fictions -- London -- Englishness -- Last word