When William met Mary: The rewriting of Mary Lamb’s and William-Henry Ireland’s stories in Peter Ackroyd’s "The Lambs of London"

Peter Ackroyd’s London novels represent a distinctive component in his project of composing a literary-historical biography of the city. Understanding London as a multilayered palimpsest of texts, Ackroyd adds to this ongoing process by rewriting the city’s history from new, imaginative perspectives. For this he employs approaches and strategies such as parody, pastiche, genre mixture, metafiction, intertextuality and an incessant mixing of the factual with the fictititious. The aim of this article is to explore the various ways in which he toys with historical reality and blurs the borderline between fiction and biography in The Lambs of London (2004), offering thus an alternative rendering of two unrelated offences connected with late eighteenth and early nineteenth century London literary circles: Mary Lamb’s matricide and William-Henry Ireland’s forgeries of the Shakespeare Papers

The performance of high-tech companies: The evidence from the Visegrad Group

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the financial performance of large high-tech companies (both product- and service-oriented) in the Visegrad Four (V4) countries. We concentrate on the five-year period from 2007 to 2011. As the performance indicators, the most frequent financial measures – liquidity, profitability and solvency ratios – are used. We use two-dimensional classification to analyse the financial situation of large high-tech companies among the countries in the Visegrad Group. The research sample includes 139 Czech, 68 Hungarian, 270 Polish and 37 Slovak large high-tech companies. The results from this study indicate that the profitability, liquidity and solvency ratios increased in large manufacturing high-tech companies within the investigated period in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, while in Poland and Hungary the situation in the manufacturing sector was exactly the opposite. In terms of the service high-tech sector in the Visegrad countries, the ratios are volatile with a decreas-ing tendency. The results also indicate that the high-tech sector consists of companies with high liquidity, rather than companies with strong profits. Finally, correlation and regression analyses are conducted to examine the nature and extent of the relationship between profitability and liquidity

Connection between Customer Relationship Management (CMR) and Market Orientation (MO) and the Influence of Size of a Company and Type of Market on CRM and MO

Purpose of the article: This paper is concerned with Market Orientation (MO) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). These two topics have been frequently explored in the field of corporate management and marketing. Nevertheless, these two concepts are still analyzed separately in the literature. This article explains why these concepts are interdependent and sets the degree of dependence of these concepts. It also finds out whether the level of MO and CRM is dependent on company size or the type of market. Methodology/methods: This article has been prepared based on the analysis of secondary and primary sources. The primary research was conducted on a sample of 29 completed questionnaires provided by firms from the aerospace field in the Czech Republic. The level of CRM and MO was determined for each company and a statistical verification was conducted. Scientific aim: One aim of this article is to reveal the interconnections between MO and CRM. Other aim is to determine whether CRM and MO are affected by the size of the company and whether they depend on the type of market (business-to-business, i.e. B2B or business-to-customer, i.e. B2C). Findings: Findings of this article are new information in this area. The data strongly support the proposition that MO is interconnected with CRM, while no dependence on the size of the company or the type of market has been confirmed. Conclusions: This research supports the opinion that MO and CRM are appropriate for each of the researched type of the company (under certain conditions). The findings must be considered within the limitations of this study. Conclusions for the whole business may be drawn after the comparison of experiences across business sectors from different countries

IAN MCGUIRE’S THE NORTH WATER IN THE CONTEXT OF NEO-VICTORIAN FICTION

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The might and glory of the city celebrated – London’s theatricality in Peter Ackroyd’s The Clerkenwell Tales

Together with intertextuality, criminality, occultism and psychogeography, theatre culture and urban theatricality represent a cornerstone of Peter Ackroyd’s conception of London. The motif or theme of theatricality appears in all his London novels, most notably in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994), as well as in his major theoretical works on London history and the development of the English literary sensibility. The aim of this article is to demonstrate how his novel The Clerkenwell Tales (2003), through its multiple plots and a miscellaneous cast of characters in the best Chaucerian tradition, portrays and vivifies various theatrical aspects of medieval London and its life

The Living Presence of Invisible Agencies and Unseen Powers – The Dramatised and Reinvented History of Peter Ackroyd’s Novels

The voluminous body of work of Peter Ackroyd, one of the most versatile contemporary British writers, comprises chiefly of non-fiction and fiction. The first is dominated by his books on English history, English literature, the history and development of London, and a series of biographies of outstanding personalities he labels “Cockney Visionaries”, the latter by his novels. Taking some of the recent tendencies in historical fiction as a frame of reference and focusing on Ackroyd’s novels set solely in the past and both in the past and the present, this article examines how the various sides of his professional self – an historian, literary historian, biographer and writer – combine and intersect in his rendering and re-enacting history as a lively material and inheritance that can still be palpable in and illuminating for our present experience

"Reality is the invention of unimaginative people” – the Counterfeiting and Imaginative London of Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton

Peter Ackroyd’s most ambitious literary-historical project is to compose a biography of London, to reconstruct the city through the texts it has created, allowed to be created, incited or inspired. His fictional London, though always diverse and heterogeneous, has several idiosyncratic features such as intertextuality, metafiction, irrationality, supra-temporality and a focus on the unofficial or marginal aspects of its history. This article tries to explore the various roles of the city within the narrative and meaning structure of Chatterton (1987), arguably the author’s most metafictional novel to date. The article is especially interested in how the city is used to develop the novel’s arguments concerning the theme of the authenticity, originality, and ethical limits of artistic creation

Transgressive Spatiality and Multiple Temporality in Jim Crace’s Arcadia

Arcadia (1992), Jim Crace’s most distinctively urban novel, bears the idiosyncratic features of its author’s writing: it is a deceptively simple story of vague geographical and historical setting conceived as a parable of the current world concerns, it portrays a community in a transitional moment of its existence, and it places special emphasis on spatial representations of its fictitious environment which assume metaphorical properties that convey the story’s rich ideas. Moreover, as a writer focusing on moral issues with a leftist political outlook, Crace has been consistent in his criticism of the neoliberal market economy and its negative impacts on communal values, a view which is also voiced in the novel. This paper makes use of the theoretical premises of Transmodernism as well as analytical tools of phenomenologically focused geocriticism to demonstrate that Arcadia can be subsumed within so-called transmodern fiction. This critique of globalized capitalism is carried out through sites Eric Prieto terms as the entre-deux, the in-between. Accordingly, the paper attempts to demonstrate how the novel’s liminal and heterogeneous places display non-linear and complexly interrelated temporalities which are indicative of their role within the city’s progress

PLAYFUL AUTHENTICITY OF FICTITIOUS HISTORY IN GRAEME MACRAE BURNET’S HIS BLOODY PROJECT

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The Gift of Stories – Imagination and Landscape in Jim Crace’s The Gift of Stones

Jim Crace is known for his compelling, parable-like stories written in rhythmic prose and for his distinctive diction, which combines poetic figurativeness with the precision of exact description. As a writer with an exceptional sense of observed detail, Crace’s narrative power lies in his ability to render places, especially various kinds of landscapes, which, in spite of their wholly fictitious character, evoke a strong feeling of plausibility and familiarity. Nevertheless, his imaginary milieux are never devoid of human experience and his stories examine the close interconnectedness between his protagonists and the places they occupy or move through. Crace likes to depict what the critics have termed “communities in transition”, i.e. groups of people who need to face up to an imminent socio-economic change and adapt to the newly emerging circumstances, which is why his fictional landscapes always reflect the protagonists’ disturbed psyches as they project into them the anxieties and frustrations that result from the process of revising and restoring the essentials of their shattered identities. The Gift of Stones (1988) not only explores such a transition, but also elaborates on the significance of making up stories in human life. This paper demonstrates how the novel’s physical environments intertwine not only with the main protagonist’s mental world but, above all, with his talent for imaginative storytelling