历史、民族与真实——评《彼得·阿克罗伊德:历史书写与英国性》

History,Nation and Truth—On Peter Ackroyd:Historical Writing and Englishness

《彼得·阿克罗伊德:历史书写与英国性》为国内第一本关于英国当代作家彼得·阿克罗伊德的批评专著,该书主要聚焦该作家的“作家传记”“经典改编”和“历史小说”三类文本,分析其如何在书写历史过程中重构“英国性”。该书还对历史与当下间的关系、世界主义与民族主义的冲突以及文学书写中的真实与虚构三个问题进行了回应。

Peter Ackroyd:Historical Writing and Englishness is the first monograph in which Peter Ackroyd is taken as the critical focus by a Chinese scholar.Centering around three genres of writing by Ackroyd,namely,biographies on writers,adaptations of classic works and historical fictions,this book explores into how the writer reconstructs Englishness through historical writing.This paper proposes that this book also responds to the following three questions:How to tackle the relationship between the history and present among the postmodernist trend?How to balance between cosmopolitanism and nationalism with the rise of populism?How to approach the truth in fictional imagination of literature works?