Reality is the invention of unimaginative people" - the Counterfeiting and Imaginative London of Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton
Abstract
Peter Ackroyd's most ambitious literary-historical project is to compose a biography of London, to reconstruct the city through the texts it has created, allowed to be created, incited or inspired. His fictional London, though always diverse and heterogeneous, has several idiosyncratic features such as intertextuality, metafiction, irrationality, supra-temporality and a focus on the unofficial or marginal aspects of its history.
This article tries to explore the various roles of the city within the narrative and meaning structure of Chatterton (1987), arguably the author's most metafictional novel to date. The article is especially interested in how the city is used to develop the novel's arguments concerning the theme of the authenticity, originality, and ethical limits of artistic creation.