Julian Wolfreys

Key concepts in literary theory

This title provides clear and useful discussions of the main areas of literary, critical and cultural theory. It includes Key Concepts in Literary Theory presents the student of literary and critical studies with a broad range of accessible, precise and authoritative definitions of the most significant terms and concepts currently used in psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial literary studies. It includes more than 100 additional terms and concepts defined. It provides newly defined terms that include keywords from the social sciences, cultural studies and psychoanalysis and the addition of a broader selection of classical rhetorical terms. It is an expanded chronology, with additional entries and a broader historical and cultural range. It offers expanded bibliographies including key texts by major critics.

Critical keywords in literary and cultural theory

This book is an invaluable reference guide for students of literary and cultural studies which introduces over forty of the complex terms, motifs and concepts in literary and cultural theory today. Critical Keywords in Literary and Cultural Theory - gives students a brief introduction to each concept together with short quotations from the work of key thinkers and critics to stimulate discussion and guide genuine comprehension. - supplies helpful glosses and annotations for each term, concept or keyword which is discussed - offers reflective, practical questions at the end of each entry to direct the student to consider a particular aspect of the quotations and the concept they address - provides explanatory notes and bibliographies to aid further research This essential volume is ideal as both a dip-in reference book and a guide to literary theory for practical classroom use.

Peter Ackroyd: the Ludic and Labyrinthine text

Peter Ackroyd: the Ludic and Labyrinthine Text offers the reader the first major critical study in English of one of Britains most inventive, playful and significant writers of the twentieth century. Attending to the contours of Ackroyds rhetorical strategies, narrative structures and his self-conscious borrowing from other writers, this study playfully yet rigorously engages with questions of literary stylistics, pastiche and parody, humour and camp sensibility, memory and temporality, personal and national identity and, finally, the importance of London to Ackroyds writing. Rejecting the postmodern label which previous critics have attached to the author, Jeremy Gibson and Julian Wolfreys depart from this understanding of Peter Ackroyds work, to provide a thought-provoking consideration of all his writings to date, from his poetry and critical thought, to his novels and biographies, including Milton in America and The Life of Thomas More. This will be an indispensable study for anyone interested in Ackroyd, in literary stylistics, and in the condition of the novel at the end of the twentieth century.

‘Endless Variety’: Writing the City in the Biographies, The House of Doctor Dee & Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem

London holds a significant place in many of the texts of Peter Ackroyd, a significance which may well be brought to the fore in unexpected and unpredictable ways with the publication of Ackroyd’s forthcoming Secret London.1 Not merely the stage on which his narratives are enacted, the city of London is itself theatrical, a performative phenomenon more accurately described not as a place, but as that which takes place. There is an unending reciprocity between the city and the writing subject. As there is always one more undiscovered street, so there is always another story to tell. As one reviewer puts it, in a review of Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, ‘The crepuscular atmosphere of industrial London … meticulously evoked by the author … is no mere backdrop for the action; it is the reason for it’ (Meyer 1995). As Ackroyd himself asserts in his biography of Charles Dickens, the dark reality of nineteenth-century London determines the novelist’s vision of the city, which vision in turn, as a response to that darkness, adds ‘to the reality itself…. When we see London now, it is in part his own city still’ (D 275). London is written by Ackroyd and it, in turn, writes his characters, whether those characters are the fictional Tim Harcombe, Goosequill, or Nicholas Dyer, or the figures of Charles Dickens, William Blake and Thomas More. The Act of writing the city, and the city’s performative projection onto the condition of the subject, effectively dismantles any neat distinction between the word and the world, writing and reality.2 This is not to suggest that the world, or what we call ‘reality’ does not exist. Rather, the point is, that Ackroyd’s writing, and, specifically, his engagement with the urban space, unfolds the interwoven and essentially textual condition of the world and our perception or comprehension of it.

Notes Towards a Poethics of Spectrality: The Examples of Neo-Victorian Textuality

I cannot do much but touch upon the other. The other never does anything other than to touch me.

‘I am, yet what I am’: Theory, Being, and Dis-appearance

Much discussion of the spectral has emerged, inevitably perhaps as an after-effect of Derrida’s most visible consideration of the spectral in Specters of Marx. The ‘spectral’ turn has in large part divided itself into three areas: (1) a reinvention of the Gothic, and with that supernatural, uncanny, and ‘weird’ fiction, in which, neutralized and normalized, ‘spectrality’ is taken largely as a metaphor for a range of assumed relations between tropes, types, and genre overlaps; (2) the ‘virtualizing’ effect of digital technologies, the Internet, email, texting, etc. This has largely been consigned to a theorized cultural studies, with a more or less politicized agenda to do with globalization, simulacra, and increasingly a world perceived as virtual rather than material; (3) by far the least explored, and the most interesting post-Derridean thinking on the spectral, hauntology and so on, has to do with memory, the trace, perception, in short, a kind of haunted (quasi-) phenomenology, which is now in more or less ‘translated’ versions of critical thought in the work of Jean-Luc Marion and Alain Badiou. In this, it is necessary to consider how the subject is both constituted and responds to the trace, experience becomes perception, becoming in turn that which returns as the trace of its earlier traces in memory, in order to present itself hauntingly as what Edmund Husserl describes as ‘re-presentation’: that image indelibly written onto the self, which finds its effect in the interface between who we are and how we are made to feel by that which returns and which can, in any given moment, reiterate itself.

Hollywood Gothic/Gothic Hollywood: the Example of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard

Sunset Boulevard (dir. Billy Wilder, 1950) concerns the life — and death — of Joe Gillis, a struggling Hollywood screenwriter. It also focuses on the death-in-life of Norma Desmond, a once famous actress of the silent screen, and now parody of her previous incarnations, as she lives amongst her memories, delusions, and the remnants of a ghostly Hollywood past. Gillis, attempting to save his car from being repossessed, turns into the driveway of Desmond’s run-down Sunset Boulevard Mansion. At first, for some inexplicable reason, he is mistaken for an undertaker, the corpse in question being that of the actress’s dead chimpanzee. However, on learning Gillis’s real profession, Norma invites the writer to stay, to look over an unwieldy melodramatic script retelling the story of Salome, on which Norma Desmond has been working. Agreeing, Gillis finds himself also agreeing to stay at the house, ostensibly for convenience sake, but, in reality, to avoid the debt collectors. Once there, he finds it increasingly difficult to free himself from the claustrophobic situation into which he has been dragged. Eventually, following a love affair between the has-been actress and never-was writer, an evasive encounter between Norma and director Cecil B.

‘A tiny light/seen in the mind’s eye as a phoneme’: the Poetry of Peter Ackroyd

The three volumes of poetry written by Peter Ackroyd — Ouch (1971), London Lickpenny (1973), Country Life (1978) — appeared over a seven-year period. Subsequently, they resurfaced in 1987, albeit partially, like the erased phrases of writing found on stone walls in Ackroyd’s The House of Doctor Dee, as a selection entitled The Diversions of Purley and Other Poems, a slim volume of fifty-three poems, some in prose. The poems of these hard-to-find publications appear densely allusive. A first, or even a second encounter will not, however, yield the meaning behind such use of allusion or reference, supposing that some ulterior meaning is at work in the frequency of allusion. We find ourselves in a textual archive without a key to the ordering or purpose of that structure. The archive of apparent reference obtrudes itself everywhere across the already fragmentary texts, seeming to demand or command: ‘read me’. Yet they remain not-read, even when the source is known, recognized or identified. Thus, the purpose of allusion, reference, parody and, in short, all playful troping, all the while on the surface of the text, if not in fact constitutive of the very texture of the text itself, remains undecidable, demanding in this undecidability that we continue to try to read. Yet it is precisely because the archive is not so easily resolvable into a purposeful unity that its play demands it be taken seriously. It is as if Ackroyd’s poetry, rather than awaiting passively the scholarly attention of a careful reader, searches for another kind of reader altogether, whose interest is in the act of masquerade, and not in what might lie beneath or behind the performance. That which Ackroyd places in the archive seems to seek a correspondent, someone who will receive these wayward transmissions; the identity of the addressee remains to be known, however. And if we rely on reading, nothing, we will find, is less reliable.

Introduction: the ‘Ludicrous’ Text of Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd: the Ludic and Labyrinthine Text addresses principally the novels and poetry of Peter Ackroyd. Aware as we are that this is one of the first full-length studies of Ackroyd’s work,1 we have nonetheless limited ourselves to considerations of The Great Fire of London, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, Hawksmoor, Chatterton, First Light, English Music, The House of Doctor Dee, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, Milton in America, and the poems of Ouch, London Lickpenny, Country Life, and The Diversions of Purley and Other Poems, which is the most recent reprinting of poems selected from the previous three volumes.2 Ackroyd’s critical volume and cultural history of transvestism, Notes for a New Culture and Dressing Up — Transvestism and Drag, are considered briefly. The biographies are not discussed in any length, except where passages from these treat of London and support the reading of Ackroyd’s visions of the city from the novels The House of Doctor Dee and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, in Chapter 4 of this book. Specifically, the biographies of Dickens, Blake and More will be referred to in discussions of urban space and the mediation of the city in the text.

‘A bit of a game …’: the Styles of Peter Ackroyd I

Having looked at the poems, it might seem that a long space has to be travelled before one connects the poetry with the carefully constructed relationships and apparent clarity of Peter Ackroyd’s later prose. However, that distance might not be quite so far. In Ackroyd’s poetry and prose there is an abiding interest: not in the distance between this collection of words and that, but in the distance between words and what we call ‘reality’. For Ackroyd that vaster space, between words and reality, reveals a condition of undecidability which he continuously traces and retraces in a play between representations of the physical world and its past, and wry meditations on the values of such representations. This play of traces is to be read reciprocally entwining itself. It promises connections as figures, characters, images, phrases are unfolded and reiterated throughout Ackroyd’s writing. One novel may be read as possibly alluding to, or being ghosted by, the mark of the poetry, or otherwise, and in retrospect, anticipating any other text. This is seen, for example, in the possible overflow between the poem ‘Across the street … ’ (DP 42) which features the amusement arcade, Fun City, and The Great Fire of London, in which Fun City also appears. If the poetry and criticism do not share ostensibly in the reiterative and open-ended seriality of Ackroyd’s narrative labyrinth (though it is the case that the poetry is marked and re-marked by its own reiterations), then they may be said to reconfigure it in some manner and in other words.