Peter Ackroyd’s Distorted Psychogeography

This paper focuses on Peter Ackroyd’s unique type of psychogeographical writing. Therefore, apart from an overall elaboration on his works about London, it addresses his historiographic metafictional novels Hawksmoor (1985) and The House of Doctor Dee (1993). These esoteric novels provide insight into Ackroyd’s writing about the city in different time periods and make it possible to delve deeper into what this paper argues is his distinctive manner of implementing the notions of psychogeography. At the same time, it draws parallels from classical and contemporary psychogeography where appropriate and highlight his utilisation of it. The main aim of this paper is to reveal the ways in which Peter Ackroyd uses walking in the city to reflect its manipulative power over his characters which results in the transformation of their identities.

Transformation of the images of woman and child in the Neo-Victorian novel (based on the novels “Florence and Giles” John Harding and “The Trial of Elizabeth Cree” by Peter Ackroyd

Neo-Victorian novel is one of the main trends in the development of modern British literature. This article traces the transformation of the images of woman and child in the Neo-Victorian novel of the 1990 – 2010s in comparison with the Victorian pretext (the novels “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James, “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë, “Oliver Twist”, “David Copperfield” by Charles Dickens). The research material includes the novels “Florence and Giles” John Harding and “The Trial of Elizabeth Cree” by Peter Ackroyd. It was determines that the Neo-Victorian novel fools with the audience’s perception of stereotypical gender concepts, as well as poetics of the Victorian novel, according to which the title character, namely a woman or a child, is the object of the author’s and reader’s affinity. The article examines the role of references in the aforementioned neo-Victorian novels to the “thrilling” stories of Edgar. Poe, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” by Robert Louis Stevenson. It is revealed that the traditional “angel in the house” in the Neo-Victorian novel is transformed into the evil “Mrs. Hyde”, exacting vengeance on the world for the humiliations because of her gender and social status. The author reviews the role of intermedian references in the novel “Florence and Giles”. The conclusion is made that the dialogue with pretexts allows modern writers to touch on the topics of women's education and gender inequality in the past and present.

The Mysterious Talent

The article studies giftedness and talent representation in contemporary British literature by means of analysing three novels: “When We Were Orphans” by Kazuo Ishiguro, “The Thirteenth Tale” by Diane Setterfield and “Milton in America” by Peter Ackroyd. The topic of giftedness appears in these works as part of the genre and form game, which is an important immanent property of postmodern literature. The plots and themes are reconsidered and played with like a set of toy building blocks used to construct a new building that makes sense only in the context of the already existing constructions. The paper shows that the concept of giftedness appears in contemporary British novels mainly as part of a game of parody, which reflects the idea of the world as imagery and confusion.

Iain Sinclair’s Early Writing

Chapter 5, ‘Iain Sinclair’s Early Writing: The Arcane Scholarship of Place’, begins by exploring the special influence of an eccentric 1914 text by Elizabeth Gordon entitled Prehistoric London: Its Mounds and Circles (1914) on Sinclair’s occult-inflected poetic geographies of London. Examining his creative exchanges with other writers, including Peter Ackroyd and Alan Moore, it explores the coterie atmosphere of Sinclair’s early work before going on to navigate his increasingly venomous and toxic vision of East London and the Thames Estuary in the period spanning 1970 to 1994, adumbrating and critiquing the parallel development of what Patrick Wright has called the ‘acid negativity’ of Sinclair’s prose.

DIALECTIC INTERACTION OF REALITY AND UNREALITY IN PETER ACKROYD’S WORK “THAMES: SACRED RIVER”

This article analyzes the structure of the concept “Thames” in the literary and regional bestseller of Peter Ackroyd "Thames: Sacred River” as the general cognitive-matrix model that represents the cognitive structure of the whole work. Besides, the concept “Thames” is analyzed within the theory of egocentric categorization of space in language as means of world interpretation. In that aspect, the concept “Thames” is considered as an image of the surrounding space reflected by the creative consciousness of the author. The cognitive-matrix model and space- categorization model assist to disclose the integration of the linguo-country and linguo-cultural cognitive components of the complex concept “Thames” in their dialectic interrelation and interaction as cognitive means of synthesis of Reality and Unreality, dialectics of Space - Time - Continuum in Peter Ackroyd’s work.

De utopía y paraíso: presencias de Tomás Moro en John Milton

Se exploran las posibilidades intertextuales existentes entre la Utopía de Tomás Moro (1478-1535) y algunos textos en prosa y verso del poeta y polemista John Milton (1608- 1674). La discusión se da a partir de la novela Milton in America, del británico Peter Ackroyd (1949), en la que se sugieren ciertas relaciones (y controversias) confesionales, literarias e ideológicas entre los pensadores. A partir de ahí, se hace una revisión de pasajes en los que la presencia de Moro en la obra de Milton, tema casi inexplorado académicamente, resulta más evidente. Se propone aquí que, a pesar de las diferencias entre ambos, Milton abrevó en las ideas utópicas de su predecesor para construir una idea de 'lugar ideal' o 'no lugar' que daría pie a la configuración del paraíso en el poema épico Paradise Lost.