A Study On Peter Ackroyd’s London As Unjust Space

Peter Ackroyd is an English biographer, novelist, and critic with aparticular interest in the history and culture of London. he was born in Londonwhich he describes as the “landscape for my imagination” in most of his work.As cultural problem, the urban is so important that a special subject of urbanhistory research was formed in the mid1940s and developed in the1970s and80s. History of the world is history of human urban. Countries, government,politics, religion and so on, are all based on this basic form of humanexistence.This thesis is divided into three parts, including the introduction, bodyand conclusion. The introduction introduces Peter Ackroyd’ life, HenriLefebvre’s space theory, and illustrate the theme and research value. The bodypart has three chapters. The first chapter is to analyze London’s landscape,including the lost Thames, feverish buildings, pretended slums andClerkenwell. Then a conclusion will be reached that the natural space isdisappearing. The second chapter focus on discussing four paradoxes ofLondon’s representations of space, aiming to clarify the Uneven GeographicalDevelopment of London by analyzing this four paradoxes. The third chapterdiscusses London’s representational spatiality from two aspects: two spatialcritique and globalization. London’s Feminine Principle and exclusionprinciple will be analyzed by spatial feminist critique and postcolonial critiquerespectively. Then it will show how to transform from Utopia to dialecticalUtopia under the background of globalization. Last, from what has beendiscussed above, I can draw the conclusion that as megalopolis, London is alsofacing with many problems, especially the spatial injustice problem. It consistsin the disappearing natural space, uneven geographical development, anddisparity between real space and imagined space. According to analyzing the London in Peter Ackroyd’s works fromspatial perspective and studying the unjust space, this paper attempts to showurban problems which are caused by deepening urbanization and globalization,and give a systematic summary to the new trends in the cultural geographicalresearch, hoping to add something significant and valuable to urban studiesand the cultural geographical research at home.