This is an in-depth study of the nine novels written by Peter Ackroyd before 1998, with side glances at the poetry, the biographies and other non-fictional works. The study highlights Ackroyd's central position as a practitioner of historiographic metafiction in England and his singular contribution to the development of literary postmodernism.  At the same time the study shows how, for all its display of postmodernist self-reflexivity and experimentalism, much of Ackroyd's fiction really becomes understandable only in the light of a range of esoteric and mythical ideas with clear roots in the English visionary tradition.