Heterotopic Clashes in David Lodge’s The British Museum Is Falling Down and Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem
Heterotopic Clashes in David Lodge’s The British Museum Is Falling Down and Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem

Summary/Abstract: David Lodge’s The British Museum is Falling Down and Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and theLimehouse Golem represent a famous British institution as more than a setting, inviting redefinitions ofthe museum as an institutional cultural site, as a heterotopia of time acquiring sometimes unexpectedcultural and ideological uses. The paper examines the ways in which the fictional rendition of the BritishMuseum signals important cultural changes in Lodge’s narrative set in the 1960s, while in Ackroyd’snovel it sets the same institution in a Victorian setting, achieving effects created by the apparentlyunexpected combination of Gothic elements and poststructuralist perspectives on subjectivity.

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