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.