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Article: Peter Ackroyd and Father Thames.(Book review)
- Article from:
- Contemporary Review
- Article date:
- September 22, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 Contemporary Review Company Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Thames: Sacred River. Peter Ackroyd. Chatto & Windus. [pounds sterling] 25.00. xiv + 490 pages. ISBN 978-0-701-17284-8.
Sometime in the late 1990s, after a period of prodigious experimentation in which he established a new genre, the fictionalised biography, Peter Ackroyd must have decided that neither fiction nor biography were capacious enough to accommodate his myriad interests in English cultural traditions. That is when he renounced the convention of make-believe and turned encyclopaedic. The likes of The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), Hawksmoor (1985), and Chatterton (1987), soon gave way to meta-historical pieces such as London: The Biography (2000) ...