The Postmodern Representation of Reality in Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton

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.