Correlation Of Terms 'Fiction’ – ‘Nonfiction' In Biographical Works By Peter Ackroyd

Abstract

On the example of books by P. Ackroyd and the developed in Russia literary history and criticism studies of his works, this article discusses the existing terms in the sphere of fictional and nonfictional texts of biographies and history based literature, such as ‘historical metafiction’, ‘docufiction’, ‘mockumentary’, ‘fake fiction’, ‘false narrative’, etc., in comparison to the existing Russian terminology of text attribution; as well as in contrast to the genre and style of academic biography. The study of methodology for academic biographical writings in combination with the cognitive attitude in the form of gradual estimation gives grounds to an outline gradual scale, which considers variations of biographical genre from nonfictional informative texts to fictional creative writings. The parameters for grading such texts on the cognitive scale are summarized in the form of a chart, which includes the author and reader perceptive criteria for the suggested distribution of terms. The examples of some P. Ackroyd’s books show that a particular author can create texts of different grades on the ‘fiction – nonfiction’ scale, even if it was not the writer’s intention to mark his texts evidently as ‘true’ or ‘false’. The suggested possible solutions for text attribution and the resulting readers’ attitudes to reading modes of such texts are considered important for translation, interpretation and education in Russian-English linguistic and literary studies