As might be expected, his novels are not conventionally realistic, but his innovative approach to fiction has not led him into the cul-de-sacs of hyper-selfconscious experimentalism or navel-gazing phenomenology. He insists on the autonomy and formal absoluteness of language, on the way in which language constitutes meaning only within itself, and he therefore challenges the philosophical basis of orthodox realistic fiction, regarding its conventions as no longer having any validity for the modern writer. Before the appearance of his first novel, it seemed that his writing career was likely to develop in the fields of literary criticism and biography, but with ten novels in quick succession between 19 he has established himself as one of the most gifted and imaginative English novelists to have emerged during the recent past.Īckroyd's polemical book, Notes for a New Culture, contains a relentless attack on the parochialism and impoverishment of contemporary English culture, especially literature and the academic literary establishment he makes clear his intellectual allegiance to Continental (primarily French and German) models and theories descending from such figures as de Sade, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, and Husserl, in opposition to what he sees as the stultifying tradition of empiricism, positivism, and humanism still dominant in English artistic and intellectual life.

Eliot and more recently with his imaginatively daring biographies of Charles Dickens, William Blake, and Thomas More. Since his début as a novelist he has further enhanced his reputation as a non-fiction writer, first with his award-winning biography of T.S.

By the time Peter Ackroyd published his first novel in 1982, he was already well known in the literary world as a poet, critic, literary theorist, and cultural historian.

Ackroyd london biography