Auto/Biografía e intertextualidad en la obra de Peter Ackroyd y Julian Barnes

Abstract

Peter Ackroyd and Julian Barnes write a kind of novel that is totally rooted in the contemporary meshes of intertextuality. Their stories take off from a historical position towards an atemporal locus where present, past and even future cohabit, where characters from all times discuss the issues that have eternally bothered humankind. This makes their novels appear partly as biography, partly as historical novels and, in the end, we gather we are dealing with autobiography: the attempt to commit our own doubts to paper so as to dispose of them or view them from a better angle. Both Ackroyd and Barnes produce fine literature in the process, a thick web of themes, characters and situations through time and space, that is wholly in character with the multifaced reality we encounter daily in the contemporary, post-modern world.