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A Horror and a Beauty: The World of Peter Ackroyd's London Novels
Contributor(s): Chalupský, Petr (Author)
ISBN: 802463161X     ISBN-13: 9788024631615
Publisher: Univ of Chicago Behalf of Karolinum Press
OUR PRICE:   $19.80  
Product Type: Paperback
Published: December 2016
Qty:
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
Physical Information: 0.7" H x 5.6" W x 8" (0.85 lbs) 302 pages
Themes:
- Cultural Region - British Isles
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
Peter Ackroyd's writing is obsessed with the defining heterogeneity of London--its rich diversity of human experience, mood, and emotion, of actions and events, and of the tools through which all of this heterogeneity is represented and reenacted. But for Ackroyd, one of the foremost of the so-called "London writers," this energizing heterogeneity also has a sinister side, largely originating outside social norms and mainstream pathways of cultural production. Touching on everything from occult practices to the plotting of radical groups, crime and fraud, dubious scientific experiments, and popular, dramatic forms of ritual and entertainment, Ackroyd contends that these forces both contest prescribed cultural modes and supply the city with its characteristic dynamism and capacity for spiritual renewal.

This idiosyncratic London construct is particularly prominent in Ackroyd's novels, in which his ideas about the city's nature and his connection to English literary sensibilities combine to create a distinct chronotope with its own spatial and temporal properties. A Horror and a Beauty explores this world through six defining aspects of the city as Ackroyd identifies them: the relationship between London's past and present, its uncanny manifestations, its felonious tendencies, its inhabitants' psychogeographic and antiquarian strategies, its theatricality, and its inherently literary character.

Contributor Bio(s): Chalupsky, Petr: - Petr Chalupský is the head of the Department of English Language and Literature in the Faculty of Education at Charles University, Prague. He is the author of The Postmodern City of Dreadful Night: The Image of the City in the Works of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan.