Peter Ackroyd

Heroism as an unremitting subject conquers and even haunts literature as well as history. Historical and fictitious heroes are guiding spirits of human beings regardless of time and geography. Historians and writers have so sternly adhered to the ideals of heroism that this fascination has been transformed into hero worship dating back to antiquity, bringing heroism to the forefront as a metanarrative in history and literature. Particularly contributing to the undying predicament of literature caught between the ideal and the real, causes of heroism have been largely left unquestioned putting heroes in the shoes of a messiah. Peter Ackroyd (1949-), renowned for his historiographic metafictions fashioned within postmodernism, dares to challenge this unimpeached -ism in The Fall of Troy (2006). In the novel, Ackroyd rewrites the history of Troy and introduces an eccentric half-real hero, Heinrich Obermann, against celebrated heroes of history and literature. Accordingly, this paper reads heroism as a metanarrative and delineates how Ackroyd sketches an atypical hero by acting contrary to traditional heroism and heroic literary tradition in his vibrant postmodern parody, The Fall of Troy.

Heroism as an unremitting subject conquers and even haunts literature as well as history. Historical and fictitious heroes are guiding spirits of human beings regardless of time and geography. Historians and writers have so sternly adhered to the ideals of heroism that this fascination has been transformed into hero worship dating back to antiquity, bringing heroism to the forefront as a metanarrative in history and literature. Particularly contributing to the undying predicament of literature caught between the ideal and the real, causes of heroism have been largely left unquestioned putting heroes in the shoes of a messiah. Peter Ackroyd (1949-), renowned for his historiographic metafictions fashioned within postmodernism, dares to challenge this unimpeached-ism in The Fall of Troy (2006). In the novel, Ackroyd rewrites the history of Troy and introduces an eccentric half-real hero, Heinrich Obermann, against celebrated heroes of history and literature. Accordingly, this paper reads heroism as a metanarrative and delineates how Ackroyd sketches an atypical hero by acting contrary to traditional heroism and heroic literary tradition in his vibrant postmodern parody, The Fall of Troy.

Chatterton, a novel published in 1987 by the British writer Peter Ackroyd,
explores the ontological features of a work of art via various characters looking
for their personal histories or histories of various, objects or phenomena. The
text shows these characters fail in their goals; the history looked for or spoken
of cannot be learnt or constructed. Thus, in a postmodern perspective, the search
and construction constitute a self reference. Chatterton, eventually, exalts the
existence of history and the artwork in respect of the creator, who puts these forth,
and of the audience, who is intellectually related to these. The novel concentrates
on postmodern issues like construction, meaning, reality, relativity, the power and
limitation of the word, artifice, fragmentalion ancl merging in timelessness. The
narrative focuses on the artwork and the conception of reality as construction,
highlights their fictionality, and displays them as peculiar systems. It seems to
differ from the liberal humanist tradition with a basis of definable, established
external reality and values. Yet, the text also spontaneously reacts against the
postmodern attitude diagnosing relativity and meaninglessness. Hence, alongside
with a postmodern stance and discourse including or acknowledging the existent
and the existence, it approves of and exults over the exploration of meaning and
definition in context of history and the artwork.

Peter Ackroyd's novel The Great Fire of London is a work in which any attempt to
construct, to be or to do is undermined, neutralised or fails. With such constriction, loss and void, the heroic figure, its possibilities and options, are negated. The hero/heroine cannot realise him/herself in the contexts of the book. Alongside the futility in social and collective spheres and projects, incompetence also prevails in the personal realm of the individual and in his/her ontological strata.

In The School of the Dead (1994), Hélène Cixous investigates the kinship between writing and death by recalling Montaigne's famous perspective of philosophy, which identifies philosophizing with dying. This paper suggests a reading of Peter Ackroyd's Lambs of London in the light of Cixous's approach, juxtaposed with her "friend" (φίλος) Jacques Derrida's contributions on memory, mourning and ethics as "learning to live from the ghosts". Accordingly, the novel will be explored as a literary topos of Mnemosyne, through which the author revives the admiration and longing for Shakespeare, by resurrecting the ghosts of William Ireland, Mary and Charles Lamb.

Die Innenwelt des Schreibens. Zu Michael Lentz' Schattenfroh. Ein Requiem »Ich spreche nicht. […]Esschreibt.«(Lentz2018,9) 1 Dieser Satz wird vom homodiegetischen Ich-Erzähler Niemand geäußert. Das Vorliegen eines Ich-Erzählers zeigt, dass Schattenfroh. Ein Requiem von diesem erzählt wird, was in weiterer Folge bedeutet, dass der Text, den ›wir‹ lesen,dasProdukteinesErzählaktesvonNiemandist.Wenn dieser nun allerdings gleich zu Beginn des Textes explizit darauf verweist, dass er nicht spricht, sondern es schreibt, stellt sich die Frage, auf was für eine Instanz ›Es‹ verweist. Wer oder was schreibt, wer oder was generiert den Text, wenn sich Niemand in seiner Funktion der Erzählinstanz als bloß transitives Medium des Schreibprozesses erlebt und beschreibt? Diese Konstellation legt den Verdacht nahe, dass der Text hier gleich zu Beginn selbstreferentiell auf die eigene Genese deutet. Wie gestaltet sich das Schreiben, auf welches hier verwiesen wird, und wo ist der Ort dieses Schreibens, wenn Niemand vermerkt, dass er nicht alleine daran beteiligt ist? 1 »Es gibt keinen Schattenfroh außer Schattenfrohund du bist sein Prophet«-Die Allegorie der Schreibszene Die Frage nach der Art und Weise, wie das Schreiben, auf welches der Text Bezug nimmt, beschaffen ist, referiert auf eine Dimension von poetischer Textualität, die Ralf Simon poetische Phatik 2 nennt. Dieser Terminus bezeichnet auf einer allgemeinen  Nachfolgend wird Schattenfroh nur mit Seitenzahlangabe direkt im Fließtext zitiert.  Der integrale Punkt von Simons Re-Lektüre der Jakobson'schen poetischen Funktion liegt darin, dass das Prinzip der Ähnlichkeit, welches konstitutiv für das Wirken der poetischen Funktion ist, auf die anderen fünf Sprachfunktionen (emotive, konative, referentielle, metasprachliche, phatische) projiziert wird. Durch dieses Projektionsverhältnis übt die poetische Funktion eine transformierende Wirkung auf die anderen fünf Funktionen aus, wodurch ein sogenannter »re-entry der Funktionen in die Funktionen« (Simon 2018, 125) erzeugt wird. Als re-entry wird nach Luhmann der Wiedereintritt eines Systems, welches in dem Setzen einer Unterscheidung gründet, in das System selbst, und somit in das Unterschiedene, bezeichnet: »Entsprechend wird man den reentry der Form in die Form oder der Unterscheidung in die Unterscheidung oder der Differenz von System und Umwelt in das System auch wieder so sehen müssen, dass von demselben zweimal die Rede ist. Die Unterscheidung tritt in das durch sie Unterschiedene wieder ein. Wiedereintritt.« (Luhmann

Postmodernism worked at constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing everything, including the literary setting, thus, postmodern spaces in literature became rewarding research topics, offering new insight into the way everything is reshaped and reorganized. This paper analyzes the re-imagination of Glasgow and London, the cities depicted in two postmodern novels - Gray‟s Lanark and Ackroyd‟s Hawksmoor - as well as the motivation of the authors in using and re-imagining these cities in their texts. The dystopian facet of the two cities as presented in the novels is discussed within the postmodern framework, in which dystopias become a tool in training the reader to adjust to the ugly, the painful and the shocking in order to form a survival instinct. The last part of the paper consists of a presentation of the images of the underground as a postmodern space of death and painful truths, a paradoxical place that promises redemption and offers death.

London is an ambivalent space, a site of renewal and tradition, dissonance and harmony, fragmentation and unity, destruction and rebirth. This paper aims to investigate the mapping of London as a city prone to regeneration, constructed as a sum of factual and fictitious experiences and perceptions of the urban milieu in a transcendent spatial continuum. In this respect, geocriticism will be used as a theoretical point of departure in order to investigate London as a real and imaginary city, whereas psychogeography will be employed to trace the correlations between the physical and the cognitive maps. The cyclical design of both London: The Biography and the novel Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd will be explored in relation to the less addressed issues of spatiality and memory. Specifically, London: The Biography will be examined inasmuch as it documents the historical series of destructions and transformations undergone by the metropolis, delineating the urban milieu in its complexity and diversity. Conversely, the relationship between the cityscape and the psychological manifestations derived from the urban experience will be addressed in the novel Hawksmoor, where the eighteenth-century mystical ritualistic deaths performed by the architect Nicholas Dyer are mirrored two centuries later under the investigations of the detective Nicholas Hawksmoor. Hence, the overlap of past and present, death and rebirth, self and other, in the experienced landscape of memory.

Peter Ackroyd (London, 1949–) is considered to be one of the most productive and inventive writers of the 1980s and a leading figure in contemporary English fiction. He occupies a central position in the generation of English writers of historiographic metafiction, the trend Linda Hutcheon considers to be the best literary expression of postmodernism. In keeping with the contradictory nature of postmodernist art, historiographic metafiction expresses incredulity toward grand narratives by levelling history and literature to the same status of human discourse. Echoing this, in Hawksmoor, Ackroyd defends not only the historical coexistence of the two basic forms of human knowledge: reason and intuition, represented in the novel by empiricism and the Scientia Umbrarum, but also their complementarity, through the juxtaposition of two plot lines. Thus, he alternates the story of the mysterious murders committed near the churches built by the early eighteenth-century architect, Nicholas D...

Under the streets of London there's a place most people could never even dream of. A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, knights in armour and pale girls in black velvet. This is the city of the people who have fallen between the cracks.

Peter Ackroyd (London, 1949–) is considered to be one of the most productive and inventive writers of the 1980s and a leading figure in contemporary English fiction. He occupies a central position in the generation of English writers of historiographic metafiction, the trend Linda Hutcheon considers to be the best literary expression of postmodernism. In keeping with the contradictory nature of postmodernist art, historiographic metafiction expresses incredulity toward grand narratives by levelling history and literature to the same status of human discourse. Echoing this, in Hawksmoor, Ackroyd defends not only the historical coexistence of the two basic forms of human knowledge: reason and intuition, represented in the novel by empiricism and the Scientia Umbrarum, but also their complementarity, through the juxtaposition of two plot lines. Thus, he alternates the story of the mysterious murders committed near the churches built by the early eighteenth-century architect, Nicholas D...

Reseña, en español, de la biografía de William Shakespeare escrita por Peter Ackroyd (SHAKESPEARE: THE BIOGRAPHY; Londres, Chatto & Windus, 2005). __________________________________________________________________

A review, in Spanish, of Peter Ackroyd's biography of William Shakespeare (SHAKESPEARE: THE BIOGRAPHY; London: Chatto & Windus, 2005).

This article looks at two turn-of-the-century neo-Victorian works-Tipping the Velvet (1998) by Sarah Waters and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994) by Peter Ackroyd. Both novels offer a detailed depiction of cross-dressing and theatre in the latter part of the nineteenth century and its effects on the main characters. The article analyses each work individually to sufficiently examine significant relationships and their impact on the main heroines' character formation. Furthermore, it looks at gender performativity in the Victorian setting and the unique environment of the music halls. As demonstrated, the examined characters achieve liberation by occupying both male and female spheres and by refusing to propagate the strict rules encompassing gender binaries. As a result, both characters are able to freely explore their possibilities while wearing male clothes and arrive at a more authentic and well-rounded image of who they are.

Der vorliegende Beitrag berichtet über die Rolle von Anspielungen in Artikelüberschriften am Beispiel des deutschen Einwanderungsdiskurses. Im theoretischen Teil werden Anspielungen als ein Phänomen dargestellt, das nicht nur als bloße Manifestation von Intertextualität, sondern vielmehr als kreatives Mittel in einem interaktiven Prozess zwischen Autor/in und Leser/in fungiert. Im empirischen Teil wird anhand konkreter Beispiele eine Typologie erstellt, die Anspielungen nach dem Quellenbereich und nach Art der Bezugnahme auf den Prätext klassifiziert.  

This article proposes an analysis of Peter Ackroyd's The House of Doctor Dee (1993) in the light of two different dichotomies: Brian McHale's epistemological (cognitive) / ontological (postcognitive) dominant and John Vernon's garden / map dynamics. The House of Doctor Dee is constructed around a series of strategies closely related to the postcognitive worldview, strategies which have come to be associated with postmodernist aesthetics and which can as well be regarded as confirming and developing ideas and devices already present in previous works by the same author. Significantly, the techniques in what McHale calis the postmodernist repertoire can be said to be based on the same integrative principie that rules Vernon's garden, the latter being an image of wholeness which stands in direct opposiüon to the splitting rationale of the map. Vernon's dynamics of integration, together with McHale's ontological structures, become in my analysis the key to understanding Ackroyd's novel, while simultaneously suggesting an interesting perspective from which to approach postmodernist literature as a whole. For about two decades now, "postmodernism" has been a key word in the vocabularies of not only literary theorists but also political scientists, philosophers, artists, media theorists, sociologists, etc. 1 Almost twenty years ago, though, the American critic and writer John Barth (1966: 66) declared it to be a term "awkward and faintly epigonic, suggestive less of a vigorous or even interesting new direction in the oíd art of storytelling than sometbing anticlimactic, feebly following a very hard act to follow". In 1980, the term was beginning to enter the full range of human sciences, and still carried clear aesthetic connotations.

This book explores the postmodernist representation of reality and argues that historiographic metafictional texts, such as Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton (1987), are hetero-referential in their creation of a heterocosm, as opposed to representational and anti-representational views of art. It argues that postmodernist historiographic metafiction is not simply self-referential, but hetero-referential, consciously revealing the paradoxes of self-referentiality while simultaneously creating a heterocosmic world where the text is capable of referring to an external reality. The book highlights Chatterton’s narrative strategies and techniques which result in revealing the text’s meaning-granting process. The novel acknowledges the existence of reality and the text’s possibility of representation, but contends that reality is a human construct. In addition, the book demonstrates that representation is possible through fictive referents, and thus hetero-referential.

In The School of the Dead (1994), Hélène Cixous investigates the kinship between writing and death by recalling Montaigne's famous perspective of philosophy, which identifies philosophizing with dying. This paper suggests a reading of Peter Ackroyd's Lambs of London in the light of Cixous's approach, juxtaposed with her "friend" (φίλος) Jacques Derrida's contributions on memory, mourning and ethics as "learning to live from the ghosts". Accordingly, the novel will be explored as a literary topos of Mnemosyne, through which the author revives the admiration and longing for Shakespeare, by resurrecting the ghosts of William Ireland, Mary and Charles Lamb.

This book proposes a new interdisciplinary approach to the literary representations of London by means of correlating geocriticism, spatial literary studies and memory studies in order to investigate the interplay between reality and fiction in mapping the urban imaginary. It conducts an analysis of London in British literature published between 1975-2005, exploring the literary representations of the real urban restructurings prompted by the rebuilding projects in war and poverty-stricken districts of London, the remapping of the metropolis by immigrants, the gentrification and displacement of communities, as well as the urban dissolution caused by terrorism. The selected works of fiction written by Peter Ackroyd, Penelope Lively, Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy, J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Doris Lessing and Ian McEwan provide a record of the city in times of de/reconstruction, emphasizing the structure of London as a palimpsest, which becomes a central image. The book contributes to the development of the subject field by introducing a number of original concepts (mythopos, mnemotopos, landguage, entropic habitus, urban specularity) which connect geocriticism and memory studies. The originality of this book consists in its innovative contribution to literary studies and dynamic interdisciplinary approach which attracts a wide spectrum of interest across emerging research fields in the humanities and beyond.

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).

Peter Ackroyd'un, Türkçe'si ile Büyük Londra Yangını, The Great Fire of London adlı romanı (1982), o ana kadar reklam ve belgesel çalışmış bir filmcinin ilk sanat filmini çekme çabaları üzerine odaklanırken, art alanda çağdaş İngiliz toplumunun sıkıntılarını yansıtır ve toplumsal bunalımın sanat ve sanatçı üzerine olabilecek kötücül etkisini örnekler. Bu temanın sergilenişinde ölüm, kullanılan başat metaforlardan biridir.

The paper applies an interdisciplinary perspective to a fictional text showing that fractals as mathematical models are a powerful tool for conceptualizing life experience in biographical narratives. The multilevel construction of Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd is explored on the basis of fractal metaphor theory. This research focuses on the LIFE IS A STORY conceptual fractal metaphor which is built up on analogical mappings, mental space connections, and blends. The fractal model of metaphor in biographical narrative, which is assigned to the formula LIFE IS A STORY f (1) + f (2) + f (3) + … + f (n), contains the mental space of the intentional source domain story, which provides a way to structure the understanding of the limiting target domain of the concept life. Fractal metaphors aim at making the conceptual metaphor flexible and dynamic, renewing its ability of self-development and self-perfection, transforming itself into one of the means of changeable conceptualization of reality.

This article focuses on how the occult and esoteric is employed and explored in selected works of Peter Ackroyd, both as a theme and as a determining factor of their narrative structure. It aims to discuss the basic constituents of the writer’s mythology of London, namely a cyclic understanding of time, and a focus on the power of the genius loci and the city’s outstanding visionaries. It also shows how the occult aspects of these works undermine the traditional narrative principles of the historical novel and by means of pluralisation and hybridisation attempt to invigorate the genre. In order to illustrate the ways in which Ackroyd incorporates elements of the occult and esoteric in his works five novels have been chosen, Hawksmoor (1985), The House of Doctor Dee (1993), Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994), The Clerkenwell Tales (2003) and The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008), along with the non-fiction London: The Biography (2000).

This paper constitutes a part of one of the subchapters of my doctoral thesis the aim of which is to examine the different attitudes to esotericism in Dan Brown's and Peter Ackroyd's selected six novels. The general chapter under which this subsection falls is an attempt to frame Peter Ackroyd's and Dan Brown's esoteric narratives. Having introduced the authors' literary activities at this point, it investigates the narratological differences between them. Nevertheless, this paper exclusively focuses on one of such differences, namely, the presence of the abstract author in Peter Ackroyd's "The House of Doctor Dee" (1994). Here, using the theory of Wolf Schmid, it argues that Peter Ackroyd's text deviates from Barthes' concept of "the death of the author" and conveys the presence of the real author stylistically along with several semantic-linguistic techniques by locating Ackroyd himself within the text as an abstract author.

My paper focuses on an increasingly popular segment of contemporary fiction, namely novelistic refashioning of past stories and people’s lives in literary biographies and biofictions. These texts exhibit diverse appropriations of facts, fictional characters, novels, conventions, motifs, all assisting in establishing correspondences between the past and the present in various ways (Kirchknopf:Dissertation).My study steps towards the blending of the traditional critical theory and the creative practice, theory and craft of the new postmodern fiction. It stages a theoretical and practical enquiry in the double, hybrid functions of the texts as historical and practical.

У статті висвітлюються особливості художнього зображення протагоніста у творах, що належать до історіографічної метапрози. У якості матеріалу дослідження обрано образ англійського ренесансного вченого й окультиста Джона Ді (1527-1608) в романах Ґ. Майрінка «Янгол західного вікна» (1927) та П. Акройда «Будинок доктора Ді» (1993). Ця розвідка висвітлює ключові теоретичні аспекти історіографічної металітератури. Порівняльний аналіз біографічної та фікційної постатей доктора Джона Ді дозволив з’ясувати специфічні риси модерністського (Ґ. Майрінк) та постмодерністського (П. Акройд) прочитання цього образу. У романі «Янгол західного вікна» доктор Ді фігурує здебільшого як окультист і містик, маніпулятор людськими душами й макабрична персона, що цілком відповідає умонастроям тогочасся (сплеск інтересу до психоаналізу та до окультних практик на кшталт спіритизму). У творі «Будинок доктора Ді» протагоніст має значно більше спільних рис зі своїм історичним прототипом; найбільш характерні з них загострені для того, щоб увиразнити трагедію вченого, якого П. Акройд репрезентує у якості своєрідної проекції вічного образу Фауста. The paper deals with the peculiarities of fictitious representation of the protagonist in the texts related to historiographic metafiction. The image of John Dee (1527-1608), an English Renaissance scientist and occultist, in the novels “The Angel of the West Window” by G. Meyrink and “The House of Doctor Dee” by P. Ackroyd, has been analysed. The paper considers basic theoretical backgrounds of historiographic metafiction. Comparative analysis of the biographical and fictitious figures of John Dee enabled the author to outline specific features of the modern (G. Meyrink) and postmodern (P. Ackroyd) view of this character. The novel “The Angel of the West Window” represents Doctor Dee as a mystic, occultist, and macabre person, who manipulates human souls. This fairly corresponds to the main intellectual dispositions of the time (interest to psychoanalysis and practical occultism, i.e. spiritualism). On the contrary, the protagonist of “The House of Doctor Dee” has much more in common with his historic prototype; his most characteristic features are purposefully emphasized in order to demonstrate the tragedy of a scientist whom P. Ackroyd represents as a modern projection of Faust.

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 highlights 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.

This book contributes to the development of contemporary historical fiction studies with new analyses of neo-Georgian fiction, which, unlike neo-Victorian fiction, until now has received little critical attention. The essays included in this collection study the ways in which selected twentieth-and twenty-first-century novels recreate the Georgian period in order to view its ideologies through the lens of such modern critical theories as performativity, post-colonialism, feminism or visual theories. They also demonstrate the rich repertoire of subgenres of neo-Georgian fiction, ranging from biographical fiction, epistolary novels to magical realism. The studies of the diverse novelistic conventions used to re contextualise the Georgian reality reflect the way we see its relevance and relation to the present and trace the indebtedness of the new forms of the contemporary novel to the traditional novelistic genres.

This article explores the concept of violence in Peter Ackroyd's novel titled Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. The relationship between the protagonist and the city is considered to be the source of violence in the novel. As this work points out, it is the physical and psychological forces prevailing in the socioeconomic conditions of nineteenth century Victorian London which gave birth to, fed, and continually encouraged the ruthless serial killer for the next massacre. Yet the reader can decipher the true identity of this human monster only at the end of the novel. It is actually Elizabeth Cree, who has overcome all the difculties in her life, realised her childhood dreams and become a successful music hall actress, and is now performing her art of murder to be appreciated by Londoners in the city, which is depicted as a macrocosmic theatre stage. Since the murderess disregards her victims' ethnic, class, gender and age diversities, the reader hardly understands what motivates her to kill, and cannot establish a logical cause-effect relationship behind the murders. The use of postmodern narrative techniques in the novel's plot structure enables the author not only to challenge the norms of traditional detective fiction and reconstruct the genre but also to make the reader reconsider the concept of crime and criminal psychology which are based on prejudices and presumptions. Consequently, this article deals with such questions as: Did London in the Victorian Era offer its inhabitants equal socioeconomic , artistic opportunities? Or did the city act like a monster gnashing and spitting out its poor, weak, needy inhabitants, especially women? Is it possible to associate London's peculiar history and identity with those of the serial killer? And, what happens when the city, whose name is derived from a word meaning "fierce," becomes the mindscape of a lower-class character who has been brought up with pure hatred? Bu makale Peter Ackroyd'un Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem başlıklı romanındaki şiddet olgusunu incelemektedir. Makale romandaki şiddetin kaynağı olan şehir imgesi ile baş karakter arasındaki ilişkiyi ele alır. Makaleye göre okuyucunun gerçek kimliğini ancak romanın sonunda anlayabildiği acımasız seri katili yaratan, besleyen ve bir sonraki katliam için sürekli cesaretlendirerek adeta bir canavara dönüştüren on dokuzuncu yüzyıl Viktorya Dönemi Londra'sının sosyo-ekonomik koşullarında hüküm süren fiziksel ve psikolojik güçlerdir.Yaşadığı tüm zorlukları aşarak çocukluk hayallerini gerçekleştiren ve genç yaşta başarılı bir müzikhol oyuncusu olan Elizabeth Cree kanlı sanatını makrokozmik bir tiyatro sahnesi olarak betimlenen Londra'da izleyicilerin beğenisine sunmaktadır.Katilin kurbanları arasında etnik köken, sınıf, cinsiyet ve yaş ayrımı yapmaması, okuyucunun katilin motivasyonunu anlamlandırarak mantıklı bir sebep-sonuç ilişkisi kurmasına engel olur. Postmodern anlatım teknikleri kullanılarak oluşturulan olay örgüsü yazarın hem dedektif romanı geleneğine meydan okuyarak türü yeniden kurgulamasını hem de okuyucunun önyargı ve varsayıma dayanan suç kavramı ve suçlu psikolojisi ile ilgili yerleşik algılarını yeniden sorgulamasını sağlar. Sonuç olarak makale bir Viktorya Dönemi metropolü olan Londra sakinlerine eşit sosyo-ekonomik, sanatsal fırsatlar sağlayabiliyor mu? Yoksa şehir yoksul, zayıf, yoksun sakinlerini, özellikle kadınları, bir canavar gibi çiğnemeden yutup posalarını tükürüyor mu?Londra'nın özgün tarihçesi ve kimliğini seri katilin yaşam öyküsü ve kimliği ile örtüştürmek olası mıdır? Etimoljik açıdan isminin kökeni "şiddet" kelimesine dayanan bir şehir olan Londra, alt sınıftan, nefret duyguları ile büyütülmüş bir karakterin zihinsel haritasına dönüştüğünde ne olur? gibi sorulara cevap aramaktadır.

There are many different opinions and strong disagreements between people about the term of art. How come a given painting, book or film can be so meaningful to some, and totally worthless to others? Where the borderlines are then? How can we decide about what should be called art, and what shouldn't?

There are good reasons to call London the capital of urban fantasy. Like no other city it embodies an intertwinedness of enlightenment and modernity with notions of the occult, the mythical and the magical. The idea of an urban underworld that somehow is the dark mirror of the city is central for the depiction of a fantastic London. I will look into three examples of urban fantasy: Neil Gaiman's novel Neverwhere (1996), China Miéville's story «Reports of Certain Events in London» (2004), and Peter Ackroyd's novel Hawksmoor (1985) that portray London as a liminal space and a gothic heterotopia.

In The House of Doctor Dee by Peter Ackroyd, the two questas of the past-travelling protagonists make a palimpsest with two interwoven manuscripts telling the story of the same transmutation. The homunculus that Doctor Dee wanted to create with alchemic means becomes real after centuries in the person of Matthew, who finds his full human self after he learns the power of forgiveness.

Peter Ackroyd's 'Hawksmoor' (1985) tells two stories in alternating chapters: one set in London between 1711 and 1715, the other in present-day London. In the first story, a murderous architect beholden to occult beliefs relates his exploits and situates them within his project of subverting the Enlightenment agenda of his superiors; in the second story, told by an apparently objective third-person narrator, the detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is baffled by a series of bizarre murders. The text’s two loci in time mark, respectively, the early days of modernity, in which science and rationality appeared to herald a brighter future, and late modernity, in which this optimism has come under question. The detective, who embodies the rationalist ethos and the tenet of scientific progress, emerges as a figure whose failure casts doubt upon the validity of the core beliefs of Western culture. Peter Ackroyd’s text is an original example of the sub-genre known as the ‘anti-detective narrative.’

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.

Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) Bristol'de do mu bir ngiliz airdir. ngiliz romantik airleri Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron ve Keats için Chatterton önemli bir model ve semboldür. Kendisi do madan 3 ay önce ölen babası evlerinin hemen biti i inde olan St Mary Radcliffe Kilisesinin koro efidir. Annesi, St Mary Redcliffe kilisesinin ar ivinde buldu u bazı el yazmalarını ona verdi inde Chatterton henüz yedi ya ındadır. Bu el yazmalarını alıp tavan arasındaki minik odasında onları okurken hayal gücünü ke fetmeye ba lamı tır. Antik ça lara ve geçmi e olan merakı bu el yazmalarıyla ba lamı ve annesine bunun için hep ükran duymu tur. lk iirini yazdı ında henüz 12 ya ındadır ve 15'ine geldi inde takma isim "Thomas Rowley" adıyla yazdı ı ve Rowley Dizisi adıyla bilinen ilk eseri ortaya çıkmı tır. Thomas Chatterton okuya okuya çok iyi ö rendi i 15. yüzyıl ngilizcesini aynen kullanarak arkaik dille iirler yazmaya ba lamı tır ve kısa yoldan ün sahibi olabilmek için Thomas Rowley diye bir ortaça ke i inin geçmi te gerçekten ya adı ına ve bu iirlerin onun el yazmaları oldu una kendi ça ını inandırmı tır. Oysa o iirleri yazan henüz 15 ya ındaki Chatterton'dan ba kası de ildir. Kendi adıyla yazmı olsa, 15 ya ında bir veledin iirlerini kimsenin okumayaca ını bilmektedir. Bu sahtekarlı a ba vurarak aslında kendine ait olan iirleri, bu iirler yeni ke fedilmi eski bir air yanılsamasıyla okutup çok be enilmesini sa lamı tır. Böylelikle bir air olma yolunda büyük cesaret kazanmı tır. Chatterton kısa süre içinde Bristol'ün sıkıcı ya amından kurtulup edebi bir üne kavu mak için Londra'ya ta ınır. Henüz 17 ya ındadır. iirlerini çe itli yayıncılara götürür ama istedi i be eniyi veya ilgiyi görmez. Kısa bir süre akrabalarının yanında kaldıktan sonra 1770 Mayıs'ında Holborn semti, Brooke Soka ındaki minik bir çatı katı odasına yerle ir. Ancak üç ay sonra, yani 24 A ustos'ta sefaletten, ilgi görmemi olmaktan, hayal kırıklı ından ve girdi i depresyondan dolayı arsenik içerek henüz 17 ya ındayken ya amına son verir. Odasının kapısı kırılarak açıldı ında etraf, üstünde kendi el yazmaları bulunan yırtılmı sayfalar ve ortalı a saçılmı ka ıt parçalarıyla doludur. Polis inceleme yapar ve sonuç olarak yazdı ı raporda Chatterton'un ölüm sebebi "felo de se" -yani intihar-olarak ilan edilir. Bilinen tek bir portresi vardır. Ama Wordsworth'ün tabiriyle "bu muhte em genç adamın" silüeti "Chatterton'un Ölümü" adını ta ıyan tabloyla Henry Wallis tarafından 1856'da çizilmi ve resimde model olarak o sırada henüz 28 ya ında olan,19.

A review of Petr Chalupský's study of how the London evoked in Peter Ackroyd's novels embodies Ackroyd's transcendent view of time. Chalupský espouses a reading which is sensitive to Ackroyd's individual style in order to get the clearest appreciation of what he has achieved.