Kirjahaku

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.

Explores how physical space is represented and affects the work of two British novelists.Of Spaces and Ideas provides a deeper insight into the work of two contemporary British novelists, Jim Crace and Simon Mawer, with a particular emphasis on spatial sensibility as one of the defining elements of their poetics. Drawing on a range of literary-theoretical approaches to space, the study analyzes selected novels by the two writers to demonstrate the ways in which they render space and place and, above all, the ways in which their spatial representations allow them to express the key ideas behind their stories, namely those of identity, history, and the relationship between an individual and the environment in which they live.