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    STUDIA PHILOLOGIA - Issue no. 1 / 2015  
         
  Article:   BOOK REVIEW - SIMONA ELISABETA CATANĂ - PLAYING GAMES WITH FICTION: THE PAST IN PETER ACKROYD’S WORK. BUCUREŞTI: ARS DOCENDI, 2011. 270 PP.

Authors:  ALINA-ELENA ONEŢ.
 
       
         
  Abstract:  Peter Ackroyd is a notoriously difficult writer to pin down: his prose is in turn lucid and sinuous, fluid and overblown, cryptic and abundant in obscure detail; his stylistic register moves from a playful preference for intertext and metafiction to the stolid rigour of an archiver of lives and cities. From poetry, fiction and various types of non-fiction, he has tried his hand at various genres (including the production of television programmes), and is fantastically prolific – there is at least one volume appearing every year, and he has admitted in several interviews to working on several projects at the same time. How can any critical study hope to engage such a massive, diverse and chameleonic writer? These are some of the reasons why he has been less beloved of literary critics than, say, a Martin Amis or a Ian McEwan, for no sooner have they settled into a comfortable categorisation for Ackroyd’s prose than he immediately produces something which defies the current critical orthodoxy. Hence he is both the quintessential ‘postmodernist’ (heteroglossic, hybrid, playful), but also the biographer-turned historian, antiquarian both by temperament and vocation.  
         
     
         
         
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