Peter Ackroyd: Chatterton (1987)

Abstract

Peter Ackroyd is representative of a generation of English novelists whose education has familiarized them with poststructuralist literary theory. Inevitably this has affected their understanding of the nature of writing and entered their fiction — frequently in the form of increased verbal playfulness, self-consciousness and metafictional interventions. Ackroyd exemplifies this generational characteristic by publishing as his first book what he described as a “polemic” (Notes 9) on poststructuralist theory, Notes for a New Culture: An Essay on Modernism (1976). This was written while Ackroyd was spending two postgraduate years (1971–73) at Yale on a Mellon Fellowship. There he met John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, both poets of the New York School. Ashbery had spent nine years in France and was well acquainted with contemporary currents in French thought. In the space of two years Ackroyd had absorbed contemporary French theory with as much enthusiasm as the Yale school of critics were showing at this time.