In this study I have interpreted Peter Ackroyd's works, concentrating on three novels, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), Chatterton (1987) and Dan Leno & the Limehouse Golem (1994). I have argued that Ackroyd's novels are for a large part literary criticism written in the form of fiction where Ackroyd both re-examines and rewrites the literary past. By self-consciously basing his fiction on already existing texts and by foregrounding and thematizing the intertextual position of his novels, Ackroyd breaks away from literary realism, exposing itas a myth and a convention. In his emphasis on poststructuralist ideas, Ackroyd at the same time works to deconstruct two other myths: the truth of History and the Romantic originality. If indeed all our knowledge is based on textual and cultural sources, as Ackroyd and other postmodernists insist, then 'truth' is a relative concept and the Romantic cult of individualistic genius is impossible to maintain. Yet, against the poststructuralist consensus, Ackroyd does not wholly reject the concept of originality but, through his intertextual view of art, goes so far as to redefine it; ironically gaining his own originality by the extent and the accomplishent of his imitation of others.
In my analysis of Last Testament (chapter 2) I specifically drew attention to the merits of Ackroyd's pastiche: the novel, written in the form of a journal as if by Oscar Wilde himself, is the most complete piece of literary ventriloquism Ackroyd has ever managed to do. Yet this early novel also has another conspicuous feature: it blurs the boundaries between biography and autobiography, literary criticism and a novel (2.1.), thus extending our view of what a novel is or what purposes a novel may have. In its affirmation of the deconstructionist distrust of conventional hierarchies, such as fact and fiction, Last Testament also anticipates Ackroyd's later, more complex novels.
In the second part of chapter 2 a distinction was made between parody and pastiche, after which Ackroyd's imitation of Oscar Wilde was analysed in greater detail. Through examining aspects of Wilde's writing, such as humour and seriousness, style and general atmosphere, the fairy tales and the Symbolism, Aestheticims and Decadence, it was possible to conclude that the overall impression comes near to consummate ventriloquism - a strong illusion of reading a text by Oscar Wilde himself.
What Last Testament does in practice, Chatterton does more in theory: imitation and plagiarism, intertextuality and parody, are its central themes. In the chapter 3.1. we saw that Chatterton raises questions about the nature of art, problematizing our traditional assumptions about plagiarism and forgery and attacking the Romantic notion of originality. The novel is a true display of deconstruction at work since it reverses the conventional hierarchies: the "truest Plagiarism" becomes the "truest Poetry" (C: 87) and "original genius consists in forming new and happy combinations, rather than searching after thoughts and ideas which have never occurred before" (58). Ackroyd responds to the poststructuralist theories of intertextuality and formulates his own position, in which he defends authorship and gives a new meaning to the concept of originality. Self-reflexively, Chatterton deals with the 'anxiety of influence' and, paradoxically, overcomes it by its own thematizing of it.
The chapter 3.2. concentrated on another great aspect of Chatterton: parody and its mockery of historical truth. The novel adopts the postmodern textual view ofhistory, which means that history is open to many different interpretations and, since we can only know the past through its textual traces, any final, totalizing view of History cannot be sustained. Especially, by providing several versions of the same events - Chatterton's life and death - Ackroyd problematizes our belief in the biographical 'truth' of the 18th-century poet. Rather, it draws our attention to the representations of history, thus making the novel, what Hutcheon (1989) calls, historiographic metafiction.
In the final section of chapter 3, I argued that the two themes, intertextuality and deconstruction of history, are closely interrelated in the novel. In other words, Ackroyd's re-examination of Thomas Chatterton has a specific purpose: for the Romantics, Chatterton was important because he suffered a romantic death, but Ackroyd undermines this Romantic notion of the poet in order to show that the importance of Chatterton was not in his tragic death; instead, his real importance was in his poetry itself: as early as two hundred years ago, Chatterton understood the powers of pastiche - how history could be woken up to life through imitation and imagination. Ackroyd re-evaluates the importance of Chatterton and suggests an addition to the literary canon.
After Chatterton, Ackroyd has moved into new areas but, as my analysis of Dan Leno sought to point out, he has not rejected intertextuality or poststructuralism, but finds new significances and new areas to explore. In chapter 4.1. I charted the close intertextual relationship Dan Leno has with other books, especially with Thomas De Quincey's 'On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts'. I argued that Dan Leno and Thomas De Quincey have a kind of 'symbiotic' relationship with each other (cf. Cowart, 1993), and so called Dan Leno, and Ackroyd's novels in general, 'literature of the second degree' as a distinction from those more naive works (such as in the realist school) that attempt to hide their sources.
The chapter 4.2. explored the novel's mockery of Realism and Naturalism more systematically. Thematically, this criticism is centred around the figure of George Gissing, whose own life Ackroyd sees as more interesting than his art. Yet this mockery is achieved also in Ackroyd's own practices since he parodies literary realism by using its own methods. At points Dan Leno reads like realistic novels, but this 'realism' is at the same time undercut by the blatant use of intertextuality: by using earlier texts as the basis of his novel, Ackroyd exposes realism as a mere convention, implying that reality itself is conceived through texts, discourses and language.
In the final chapter of my study (4.3.) I showed that Ackroyd extends intertextuality to encompass no less than the basic principles of our humanity: postmodernists, like Ackroyd, see the human 'self' as intertextually defined, and so oppose the Cartesian individualism that characterises the Romantics, the Realists, and even the Modernists (cf. Saariluoma, 1992). Thus, rather than creating meanings by virtue of our innate reason, our identities are determined by the cultural texts we encounter. Most characters in Dan Leno exemplify these ideas, as their thoughts, speech and actions reflect the texts they have become exposed to. Ultimately, the most important of these characters is Dan Leno, whose endless versatility in his roles resembles Ackroyd himself: he, too, is at his most unique when imitating other styles and other writers. In every novel he has tried something new, and we can assume that so he will in the future: it seems as if there are no ends to Ackroyd's talents.