UNSTABLE SIGNS AND LIMINAL SPACES IN THE WORKS OF PETER ACKROYD

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How does one understand Peter Ackroyd’s literary preoccupations, the ludic back-and-forth that is the mainstay of his literary oeuvre, the explorations that haunt his language and the unfurling of his plots? Here, history comes under attack: it is reduced to mere constituents, to localized histories that redefine identity through fragmentary and contingent efforts. Where a reader might expect the rigid strictures of plot and character, one meets mimetic approaches, mirrorings and subversions. Drawing on concepts from hermeneutics, semiotics, narratology, city studies, queer studies and much more, this work sets out to extract fragments of meaning as they unfold throughout the Ackroydian opus. This book is for those students and scholars of literature, more broadly, and of Ackroyd’s works, more narrowly, who are interested in how meaning, identity, and place inform each other, especially within the tenuous field of liminality. Defined by Victor Turner as the space of „betwixt and between”, liminal spaces emerge as crucial arenas where selfhood, emplacement and identity are negotiated, dismantled, and reconstructed. The unstable signs of self and space and other, caught in liminal play, are the main objects which this study aims to elucidate.