Description
Over a career spanning fifteen novels, two short story collections, and eight volumes of nonfiction, Sir Martin Amis helped to define his era. Through his published work and public commentaries, his voice featured prominently in the important socio-literary debates of his time. His work contributes to literary discussions about realism, postmodernism, satire, and comedy, and his core themes range across the Holocaust, nuclear anxiety, apocalyptic millennialism and, more recently, the war on terror. His words were rarely without controversy. This Companion identifies the essential elements of Amis's work and then evaluates their potential for longevity. From his earliest publications in the 1970's to his death as one of England's most well-known writers in 2023, Amis was an outspoken critic of social myopia: how societies – and their citizens – continually choose selfishness over altruism, fatalism over improvement, and blindness over enlightenment.
Table of Contents
Part I. Genre, Style, and Structure: 1. Inimitably quotable: Amis's style and sentences Kevin Power; 2. Experiments in genre: The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, Success James Diedrick; 3. Amis's formal and structural experiments: Time's Arrow and Night Train Jean-Michel Ganteau; 4. Amis's literary criticism Sean Seeger; Part II. Politics and Public Memory: 5. Banality, evil, and bearing witness in Martin Amis's holocaust novels Maria Christou; 6. Amis's empire amiss Matthew Carey Salyer; 7. Amis's England Joseph Brooker; 8. The London trilogy: Money, London Fields, and The Information Nick Bentley; 9. Political provocateur: Amis and Islam Peter Morey; Part III. Identity Politics: Gender and Sexuality; 10. Women in Amis's transatlantic novels: femmes fatales, murderees, and female authors Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournés; 11. Re-reading Martin Amis After #MeToo Magdalena Mączyńska; 12. The pornification and Nazification of everyday life: from London fields to yellow dog Christina Ionica; Part IV. Celebrity and Spectacle Culture: 13. The artist as celebrity: Amis's literary friendships and lineages M. Hunter Hayes; 14. Staging Amis: autobiography and autofiction Gavin Keulks.
