Peter Ackroyd’s Major Novels as Historiographic Metafictions

The present research attempts to investigate the notion of rewriting history in Peter Ackroyd’smajor novels under the light of New-Historicism and postmodern poetics. The researcher arguesthat the border between fiction and history has been blurred in Peter Ackroyd’s major novels.Contemporary fiction is called historiographic metafiction by Linda Hutcheon. She tries todefine postmodern poetics drawing on concepts such as paradox, double-codedness, history,fiction, reality, and the relation of text to the world. Historiographic metafiction is influencedby the poststructuralist ideas about language, representation, and reality. In poststructuralism,text is no longer the reflector of the world; rather it is the originator of the world it presents.These conceptions challenge and deconstruct the relation between fiction and history. One of thefamous supporters of these ideas is Hayden White who talks about the similarities betweenfiction and history. Such interrogation of history and fiction is achieved by employingexperimental narrative, formal, structural, and thematic strategies that transform the establishedgenre conventions.

کلیدواژه ها:

Historiographic Metafiction ، New-Historicism ، Peter Ackroyd ، Postmodernism