Challenging History in Peter Ackroyd Chatterton

Historiographic metafiction provides an exemplary site for an investigation of postmodernist problematization of history and fiction. Historiographic metafictional texts refer to both historical referents and their own artifice, that self-consciously challenge the boundary between historical and fictional writing. The historiographic metafiction performs or transgresses the boundaries between the opposing terms of those dichotomies in order to question the validity of such oppositions and the hierarchies they conceal. Peter Ackroyd¿s Chatterton is an example of literary postmodernism in which the oppositions between history and fiction, the problematic relationship between reality and artifice are carried out within an intertextual arena.