"Peter Ackroyd: the Ludic and Labyrinthine Text offers the reader the first major critical study in English of one of Britain's most inventive, playful and significant writers of the twentieth century. Attending to the country of Ackroyd's rhetorical strategies, narratives structures and his self-conscious borrowing from other writers, this study playfully yet rigorously engages with questions of literary stylistics, pastiche and parody, humour and camp sensibility, memory and temporality, personal and national identity and, finally, the importance of London to Ackroyd's writing.". "This will be an indispensable study for anyone interested in Ackroyd, in liteary stylistics, and in the condition of the novel at the end of the twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET.