“In Blake’s Shadow": the visionary element in the fiction of Peter Ackroyd and Jeanette Winterson

Onega Jaén, Susana (Universidad de Zaragoza)

Resumen: Starting from Hal Foster’s distinction of a humanist and an anti-humanist trend within postmodernism, the essay goes on to argue that, although materialist critics tend to see Peter Ackroyd’s and Jeanette Winterson’s writings as examples of an experimentalist postmodernism characterised by metafictional playfulness and ideological depthlessness, in fact they respond to a well-thought out visionary aesthetics, whose roots go back to the supernatural conception of art and literature inaugurated by Plato and continued by Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, that reached a climax in the Romantic aesthetics that runs from Blake, Wordsworth, Novalis and Goethe to Yeats and Eliot. By reading Ackroyd’s and Winterson’s fictional works and manifestoes from this visionary perspective, the article seeks to demonstrate that the parodic undermining of visionary motifs and the antimimetic insistence on the textuality of the created worlds that are recurrent feature of their works echo both Blake’s conception of the creative imagination and the paradoxical leap of faith in transcendence that lies at the heart of his visionary aesthetics.

Idioma: Inglés

Año: 2017

Publicado en: Atilim Sosyal Bilimer Dergisi 7, 2 (2017), 4-25
ISSN: 2146-6181

Originalmente disponible en: Texto completo de la revista

Financiación: info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/MINECO-FEDER/FFI2017-84258-P
Financiación: info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/MINECO/FFI2015-65775-P
Financiación: info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/UZ/JIUZ-2017-HUM-02

Tipo y forma: Article (Published version)

Área (Departamento): Área Filología Inglesa (Dpto. Filolog.Inglesa y Alema.)