Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination by Peter Ackroyd (PDF)

Description

With his characteristic enthusiasm and erudition, Peter Ackroyd follows his acclaimed London: A Biography with an inspired look into the heart and the history of the English imagination. To tell the story of its evolution, Ackroyd ranges across literature and painting, philosophy and science, architecture and music, from Anglo-Saxon times to the twentieth-century. Considering what is most English about artists as diverse as Chaucer, William Hogarth, Benjamin Britten and Viriginia Woolf, Ackroyd identifies a host of sometimes contradictory elements: pragmatism and whimsy, blood and gore, a passion for the past, a delight in eccentricity, and much more. A brilliant, engaging and often surprising narrative, Albionreveals the manifold nature of English genius.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Wonderfully insightful short essays about many facets of English history and culture – can be dipped into at any point for enjoyable reading from a masterful writer! Not to be missed!!

⭐This is an excellent reference for any person interested in the rich panoply of expression that is English literature. As one who has read and studied from Anglo-Saxon to the present I find this a stimulating and exciting companion to read and return to like renewing a conversation with a learned friend. Each time I return to it I find a new line or writer to explore and discover or renew an old experience with a fresh understanding. It sits close to my hand at all times. There is some overreach but that all adds to freshening or challenging my experience of the special imagination that I am heir to and that is still strong, vibrant and everlasting as long as there are readers to explore and enjoy English literature.

⭐An amazing journey guided by erudition.I had ordered the book from Amazon .ca and was given the runaround for over two months .I then decided to go through Amazon .com and I got service within days!Thank you

⭐I have a Peter Ackroyd book collection that I go back to over and over again.I give copies to interested relatives and have to replace mine. This book is my favorite, but they all are.

⭐this is non-fiction

⭐I love Peter Ackroyd’s books! I would buy anything by him. He is the most interesting writerI’ve read The service was also great. I received my books on time and just as they were presented online.

⭐Brilliant and eclectic. One of the most pleasantly unusual books I’ve read in many moons…

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⭐I have raved about all his books to date. This series on the history of England is first rate and a real page turned. Cant recommend his books more highly.

⭐In this book, Ackroyd seeks to do something very ambitious – namely, to identify the nature of the English artistic sensibility. He is not trying to define the ‘Englishness’ of English art (we are, as he says, a hybrid culture after all). Ackroyd is more interested in exploring the idea of the ‘genius loci’ (the spirit of place). Accordingly, artistic patterns and repetitions recur, sometimes centuries apart, with no obvious or conscious link to explain the parallels. This is terrain, of course, that Ackroyd has already charted to haunting effect in his novel, Hawksmoor.But is it reasonable to talk about distinctively English imaginative traits? Ackroyd thinks so, and enumerates some of them: a love of antiquity; a tendency to melancholy; a habit of translating and borrowing from abroad; an appetite for heterogeneity and variety; a love of flat and intricate surface design; a preference for the practical over the theoretical; a distrust of intellectualism; and so on.Albion doesn’t pretend to be a work of scholarship. As with Shakespeare: the Biography, the book provides just so many footnotes as are needed to lend his ideas substance. In any case, what Ackroyd is good at here is making observations and connections, rather than providing absolute, forensic proof. Occasionally, his arguments aren’t at all convincing – the idea that the English love of miniature painting might be explained by the fact that ‘those who live on a small island take a delight in small things’ is flimsy. But in making the link between the illuminators of medieval manuscripts, Nicholas Hillyard and the C17 school of limners, Ackroyd is absorbing. As elsewhere in his work, we sense a deep affinity with those he writes about. After praising the philosopher John Locke’s gift of finding a homely metaphor to help make his point and avoid ‘so much useless dispute and noise in the world’ (from ‘An Essay on Understanding’), Ackroyd pulls an equally down to earth comparison out of the hat: Locke’s dislike of noise and dispute is ‘the philosophical equivalent of not making a scene in a restaurant’ – an ‘innately English’ dislike.Eclectic and speculative, rather than rigorous or academic, the real virtue of Albion is its capacity to connect across genres as well as time. It is a thought-provoking exploration of the English artistic impulse.

⭐I am a university student in Belgium and this year we are looking and trying to understand literature in the UK from the Middle Ages to the Modern Times.I love this book. It is simple and I enjoy reading it.

⭐As always ,Peter Ackroyd provides the reader with a thought provoking and informative read. Thoroughly recommended for anyone interested in England and the English!

⭐Un fantastico studio sull’immaginario inglese e la sua formazione. Analisi ottime e ben strutturate. Consigliatissimo

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