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"The Capitol of Darknesse": Gothic Spatialities in the London of Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor

"The Capitol of Darknesse": Gothic Spatialities in the London of Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor A L E X L I N K Haunted places are the only ones people can live in. . . . Michel de Certeau, "Walking in the City" Ancient things become remarkable. An uncanniness lurks there, in the everyday life of the city. It is a ghost that henceforth haunts urban planning. Michel de Certeau and Luce Giard, "Ghosts in the City" hrough the lens of the postmodern, the return of the repressed in gothic urban spaces looks ever less like the conventional longevity of the sins of the fathers that we have come to expect, and ever more like the general condition of urban historicity. Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor (1985) interrogates historicity in a London that precedes the subject and that furnishes a palimpsestic complexity transcending the subject's grasp. It posits a London replete with forgotten places that repress the excess traditionally apparent in the popular and in the feminine, and that offer the possibility of social relations unmediated by modern capitalism or national history. When these places reemerge in the uncanny, they open a space for popular voices, and they realign the urban subject's relation to urban history by fracturing its apparent seamlessness. In the process, Hawksmoor http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Contemporary Literature University of Wisconsin Press

"The Capitol of Darknesse": Gothic Spatialities in the London of Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor

Link, Alex.
Contemporary Literature , Volume 45 (3) – Oct 28, 2004
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Publisher
University of Wisconsin Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin.
ISSN
1548-9949
Publisher site
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Abstract

A L E X L I N K Haunted places are the only ones people can live in. . . . Michel de Certeau, "Walking in the City" Ancient things become remarkable. An uncanniness lurks there, in the everyday life of the city. It is a ghost that henceforth haunts urban planning. Michel de Certeau and Luce Giard, "Ghosts in the City" hrough the lens of the postmodern, the return of the repressed in gothic urban spaces looks ever less like the conventional longevity of the sins of the fathers that we have come to expect, and ever more like the general condition of urban historicity. Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor (1985) interrogates historicity in a London that precedes the subject and that furnishes a palimpsestic complexity transcending the subject's grasp. It posits a London replete with forgotten places that repress the excess traditionally apparent in the popular and in the feminine, and that offer the possibility of social relations unmediated by modern capitalism or national history. When these places reemerge in the uncanny, they open a space for popular voices, and they realign the urban subject's relation to urban history by fracturing its apparent seamlessness. In the process, Hawksmoor

Journal

Contemporary Literature – University of Wisconsin Press

Published: Oct 28, 2004

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