Mystic London

A review of B Gürenci Saglam's monograph which addresses the question of how 'knowable' is the mystical London which Ackroyd portrays in his novels. The work, which is based on Gürenci Saglam's doctoral thesis, focuses on Ackroyd's parodying of the literary genres of biography and detective fiction.

2007

Variations, 2006

The 1990s have witnessed the flourishing of a language suffused with ghosts, revenants and spectral forms. In fact, Roger Luckhurst 2 suggests that the relevance of spectrality in a wide variety of literary contexts involves, what he calls, a "spectral turn". 3 In this paper I undertake the examination of this idea of spectrality or haunting as the persistent presence of the Victorian occult, and, more specifically, spiritualism, in contemporary narratives like A. S. Byatt's "The Conjugial Angel" (1992) 4 , Sarah Waters's Affinity (1999) 5 and Julian Barnes's Arthur and George (2005), 6 among others. While the neo-Victorian novel has recently become the subject of many critical studies, a literary type of the neo-Victorian novel that revisits the Victorian past through its involvement with the occult has received relatively little exploration. Accordingly, the return of the Victorian occult in twentieth-and twenty-first century fiction will be analysed against the backdrop of notions of spectrality, haunting and ghostly returns, which are now being privileged in critical and literary discourses, as well as in the light of recent scholarship about the Victorian occult. Lastly, I would like to demonstrate that the spectral visitation of the Victorian occult in 1 The research carried out for the writing of this article has been financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology: BFF2003-05143 / FEDER.

This paper, delivered to the Literary London Society conference in 2014, considers Peter Ackroyd's representation of London as a perpetual city. It focuses on 'The House of Doctor Dee' and 'The Plato Papers', especially the depiction of subterranean London.

This study aims to analyze the significance of the city, namely London, in Peter Ackroyd's work from a postmodern perspective

Contemporary Literature, 2004

T repression of this materiality by a complex of political and scientific strategic powers extending from the Enlightenment's Christopher Wren to the Thatcher administration of the 1980s. Peter Ackroyd's critical significance to late twentieth-century English literature seems only to have increased over time. Recent years have seen the production of many articles on his work, as well as several book-length studies. Hawksmoor won Guardian and Whitbread fiction awards, and it won Ackroyd's work significant popular and critical attention. The novel has spawned numerous articles and appears frequently in studies of postmodern historiographic metafiction and of the gothic. Roger Salomon even quotes Nicholas Dyer, the novel's eighteenth-century narrator, for the title of his recent typological study of the gothic, Mazes of the Serpent (Hawksmoor 56). Hawksmoor tells Dyer's story. He is a fictitious alternative to Nicholas Hawksmoor, the eighteenth-century architect who designed several London churches after the Great Fire. Dyer designs the six that the historical Hawksmoor designed and that one can still see in London today, as well as a seventh church, Little St. Hugh, that is entirely fictitious. Entrusted with building these churches for the good of the city, Dyer, a secret Satanist at war with Enlightenment reason emblematized in his employer, Christopher Wren, works into the design, construction, and location of his churches a secret occult code and dedicates each church with the sacrifice of a "virgin" boy. The chapters detailing Dyer's exploits alternate with chapters that take place in twentieth-century London where corpses start to appear on the grounds of Dyer's churches. A detective named Hawksmoor tries to unravel the mystery. The novel closes with no resolution to the mystery, Hawksmoor rushing to Little St. Hugh to prevent, witness-or perhaps even commit-the final murder. 1 Once there, he merges enigmatically with another, mysterious being. Hawksmoor registers an anxiety that the plurality of possible modes of existence in the London ecology is growing increasingly endangered. Indeed, many of Ackroyd's essays and lectures make L I N K • 517 1. Del Ivan Janik speculates that Hawksmoor might be the novel's twentieth-century murderer. Although he admits that it is hardly " 'solid' evidence," Janik points to what he feels is Hawksmoor's increasing sympathy with "Dyer's dark mysticism" as the source of his suspicion (173).

2018

The article presents an analysis of two neo-Victorian Londons: that of Peter Ackroyd in the novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem and that of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell in the graphic novel From Hell. Particular attention has been given to the representation of the city in terms of the most characteristic elements of London and its mode of portrayal in each work. The article also presents how the British capital is personified or at least treated as a driving force behind human actions, as well as the subjectification of the city and its functioning as a text. Finally, the article focuses on the superposition of the late 19th and late 20th centuries, i.e. the times of action and writing of both works, and how relevant these texts are at the present time.

G.W.M. Reynolds and Nineteenth-Century British Society: Politics, Fiction and the Press , 2008

A 6500 word essay - This project grew out of a paper entitled ‘Working-class heroes: Jack Sheppard, Henry Holford & The Literature of Costermongers’ presented at the G.W.M. Reynolds: Popular Culture, Literature & Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century Conference, at the University of Birmingham in July 2000. The complete essay places Reynolds’ epic serial The Mysteries of London (1844 – 1856) within the inter-related contexts of social investigation, Chartism, Newgate fiction, and the Victorian literary novel, comparing and contrasting Reynolds’ masterpiece with Eugene Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1843), and depictions of the London criminal underworld by Egan, Ainsworth, Dickens and Mayhew. Reynolds’ unorthodox treatment of fallen women is considered (he doesn’t kill them off like Sue’s La Goualeuse or as Dickens does ‘The Hospital Patient’ and Nancy), as well as his views on capital punishment, and his device of allowing underworld characters to annex the text in order to tell their own stories is read as a political gesture. The paper also explores the development of the ‘mysteries novel’ as an expression of the urbanisation of industrial Britain, and the contemporary critical debate surrounding Reynolds’ politics, seeking an answer to the question of whether or not he was truly radical or merely opportunist. I argue that the chaos of the new urban environment is reflected in the structure of Reynolds’ text, in which competing narrative codes mirror the incoherent experience of the city, anticipating the postmodern novel and allowing Reynolds’ genuine political commentary to co-exist within a gothic and sensational frame that he equally exploits, satirises and subverts.

2021

Past Imperfect, 2008