Post-Baroque Sublime? The Case of Peter Ackroyd

Abstract

This paper focuses on Peter Ackroyd's English Music as a landmark in contemporary manifestations of the baroque tradition in British literature. It is based on contemporary approaches to the baroque as an aesthetic constant or strain -more than on a periodization-theory of the baroque. The demonstration is tripartite in structure. I first concentrate on the ingredients of what may be called a ''baroque diction" (flux, hyperbole, overflowing of the frame, etc.). I then move on to the representation of artifice and the artifice of representa_tio~, by concentrating on the baroque topos of the world as a stage, the exammauon of metaleptic ploys and their implications in terms of ontological or transcendent potentialities. The last part addresses the question of the baroque as a way to probe at the boundaries of traditional, phenomenal reahsm, as a force meant to extend the province of traditional mimesis by replacing representation with presentation. I conclude with some reflections on the expressionist functions of the baroque as an avatar of romanticism.