The Postmodernist Gothic Of Peter Ackroyd

Research on Peter Ackroyd's fiction so far has mainly dealt with his manipulation and adaptation of history and literary classics. Critics have made references to the Gothic elements in his novels, but only doing this en passant, especially not in connection with postmodernism. This is a gap that this thesis attempts to fill.Most of Ackroyd's novels have some sort of Gothic coloring. This thesis takes the three most representative works as research subjects:Hawksmoor, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem and The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein. The Gothic genre's evolution in the postmodernist age is traced with textual evidence drawn from these works.The central argument of this thesis is that what Ackroyd is doing in these three novels is nothing less than inventing a new genre—the postmodernist Gothic, which employs postmodernist techniques to absorb and adapt classic Gothic topoi, in order to explore certain problems in the postmodernist age. Three sub-arguments are established to support this central argument, which will be dealt with in the three main chapters.As for the critical approaches, this paper uses psychological/archetypal and poststructuralist methods. The key concepts that are employed include: postmodernism, intertexuality, Jungian theory of "shadow," Freudian concept of Doppelganger, etc.The First Chapter focuses on an archetypal interpretation of the Gothic villain Dyer in Hawksmoor, seeing him as a new development of the classic Gothic archetype of Doppelganger in the postmodernist context. Ackroyd's Gothic villain is no longer a simple stereotype, but a representative of the postmodern men and women, who try to find answers to their identity problems. Ackroyd borrows the Gothic form to examine the postmodern concern with identity or its potential loss.The Second Chapter deals with the typically Gothic element of haunted space, in this case the city of London and the churches. One important development of the Gothic genre in modern times is that the stage is moved from the largely rural environment to the cities. Ackroyd manipulates the classic Gothic space in two ways: to superimpose a fourth dimension—circular time—on it; and to treat the space as a palimpsest. These changes are closely related to the postmodern human beings' securitizing of their own existence.The Third Chapter discusses the intertexual aspects of Ackroyd's Gothic fiction. They are often adaptations and intertexual pastiches of previous Gothic texts, and as such, have little originality in topoi. They might be derivative, but this very act of derivation gains for the author a sort of originality. Besides, he does something that has never been done before in the Gothic genre:to highlight the intertexual relationship between life and texts.Ackroyd is very vocal about his admiration of the Gothic fiction and freely admits its influence on him. He considers the Gothic as an English literary tradition par excellence. On the one hand, he pays tribute to the Gothic by imitating and pastiching classic Gothic texts; on the other hand, he discusses through his Gothic fiction problems regarding the human identity and existence in the postmodern context, and the relationship between life and art. It is no exaggeration to say that he has invented a new genre—the postmodernist Gothic.