I. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Foreword on Peter Ackroyd and His Works
Born in 1949, in London, Peter Ackroyd is one of the leading figures in contemporary British fiction who began his writing career with poetry in Cambridge. After the publication of his first volume of poetry titled Ouch, in 1971, he gained immense recognition from the literary circles and he published two more volumes in 1973 London Lickpenny and 1978 Country Life. After graduating from Cambridge, Ackroyd continued his studies at Oxford, where he wrote Notes for a New Culture, in which he “recommended the major forces in postmodernism Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, as essential reading and polemically attacked the English tradition for being excessively grounded in the ‘related values of humanism and subjectivity” (Higdon, 217). Although Ackroyd is known as a postmodernist writer, he often denies being put in such a category. As Higdon states, “Ackroyd rejects being called an historical novelist or a postmodernist, preferring to identify with what he calls ‘English music’ and the Cockney visionary traditions, a stance which marks him as both” (217). In an interview with Susan Onega, Ackroyd has pointed out that his style is deeply rooted in the “English tradition” and that it is “...This combination of high and low, farce and tragedy, is something which is innate in the English tradition...just part of the inheritance that goes back as far as a thousand years" (“Interview with Peter Ackroyd”, 1). Ackroyd argues that the earlier English writers have a great impact on his style, as he is particularly under the influence of Dickens and Eliot (Smethurst). Wells explains the English tradition saying that, “This unapologetic rehashing of past texts and ideas exemplifies a peculiarly British attachment to the literary tradition...” (14). Ackroyd’s use of intertextuality then does not only serve as an element of the postmodernist style, but also as a method of clinging to earlier works and styles that...