The Postmodern Representation Of Reality In Peter Ackroyds Chatterton

Download or read book The Postmodern Representation of Reality in Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton written by Arya Aryan and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-08 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the postmodernist representation of reality and argues that historiographic metafictional texts, such as Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton (1987), are hetero-referential in their creation of a heterocosm, as opposed to representational and anti-representational views of art. It argues that postmodernist historiographic metafiction is not simply self-referential, but hetero-referential, consciously revealing the paradoxes of self-referentiality while simultaneously creating a heterocosmic world where the text is capable of referring to an external reality. The book highlights Chatterton’s narrative strategies and techniques which result in revealing the text’s meaning-granting process. The novel acknowledges the existence of reality and the text’s possibility of representation, but contends that reality is a human construct. In addition, the book demonstrates that representation is possible through fictive referents, and thus hetero-referential.