The Great Fire of London is the debut novel of British poet, novelist, and
biographer Peter Ackroyd. The novel gives an opportunity to make a thematic start to
the author' s oeuvre full of London and contains many leitmotifs that will be the
cornerstones of the author's later work. Ackroyd insists that his novels are mostly from
the English tradition, although his novels have a postmodern structure. In these works,
which are written with a labyrinth-like writing technique, it is not clear where the
fiction begins and where it ends. There is not much of a difference between poetry,
literary text, or biography for Ackroyd. The result that enables the transition between
these genres is that all these genres consist of a language game. Language games are
multilayered for the author, and the reader encounters onomastic, formal or symbolic
palimpsests in the narrative. Ackroyd’s style of writing is psychogeographic, and his
characters consider the city of London a perfect fit for psychogeographic adventures.
This urge to articulate denotes an antimodern behavior pattern in the search for a
tradition that is part of a continuity against modernism
Keywords: City of london, Charles dickens, Dystopia, Fictionalization, Formal palimpsest, Great fire of london, Leitmotif, Labyrinth, Language game, Modernism, Narrative, Onomastic palimpsest, Postmodern novel, Psychogeography, Palimpsests, Postmodern architecture, Peter ackroyd, Postmodernism, Symbolic palimpsest, Utopia.
