Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on the Contributors
ix
x
Introduction
Gavin Keulks, Western Oregon University (USA)
1
“My Heart Really Goes Out to Me”: The Self-Indulgent Highway to
Adulthood in The Rachel Papers
Neil Brooks, University of Western Ontario (Canada)
9
Looking-glass Worlds in Martin Amis’s Early Fiction: Reflectiveness,
Mirror Narcissism, and Doubles
Richard Todd, University of Leiden (the Netherlands)
22
The Passion of John Self: Allegory, Economy, and Expenditure in
Martin Amis’s Money
Tamás Bényei, University of Debrecen (Hungary)
36
Money Makes the Man: Gender and Sexuality in Martin Amis’s Money
Emma Parker, University of Leicester (UK)
55
Martin Amis and Late Twentieth-Century Working-Class Masculinity:
Money and London Fields
Philip Tew, Brunel University (UK)
71
The Female Form, Sublimation, and Nicola Six
Susan Brook, Simon Fraser University (Canada)
87
Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow and the Postmodern Sublime
Brian Finney, California State University, Long Beach (USA)
101
Under the Dark Sun of Melancholia: Writing and Loss in The Information
Catherine Bernard, Université de Paris VII (France).
117
Mimesis and Informatics in The Information
Richard Menke, University of Georgia (USA)
137
W(h)ither Postmodernism: Late Amis
Gavin Keulks, Western Oregon University (USA)
158
J.G. Ballard’s “Inner Space” and the Early Fiction of Martin Amis
James Diedrick, Agnes Scott College (USA)
180
A Reluctant Leavisite: Martin Amis’s “Higher” Journalism
M. Hunter Hayes, Texas A&M University-Commerce (USA)
197
Nonfiction by Martin Amis, 1971-2005.
Bibliography, compiled by James Diedrick and M. Hunter Hayes.
211
Index
235
Notes on the Contributors
Tamás Bényei is Senior Lecturer at the Department of British Studies, University of
Debrecen, Hungary. He has published widely on contemporary British fiction (ranging
from Angus Wilson and Iris Murdoch to Graham Swift and Jeanette Winterson), LatinAmerican fiction, and literary theory. In addition to his five books in Hungarian, he is the
author of Acts of Attention: Figure and Narrative in Postwar British Novels (1999).
Catherine Bernard is Professor of English literature at the University of Paris 7, Denis
Diderot. She has published extensively on English contemporary fiction (A.S. Byatt,
Peter Ackoryd, Graham Swift), on contemporary art, and on Moderninsm, and has coedited several volumes of essays on Virginia Woolf, including Virginia Woolf: Le pur et
l'impur (2002). A monograph on Mrs Dalloway is to come out with Gallimard in 2006.
Susan Brook is Assistant Professor in English at Simon Fraser University. Her
monograph on Angry Young Men, Women and the New Left is forthcoming from
Palgrave. Other work includes articles on Lynne Reid Banks, John Osborne, and Hanif
Kureishi. Her current research focuses on suburbia in postwar British literature, film and
television.
Neil Brooks is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Huron
University College, University of Western Ontario. His main areas of research are
African American literature and the contemporary novel. His recent publications include
articles on Thomas Pynchon, Julian Barnes, Walter White, and James Weldon Johnson.
He is co-editor of Literature and Racial Ambiguity (2002) and of the forthcoming
volumes Attending the Wake of Postmodernism and Reading at the Wake of
Postmodernism.
James Diedrick is Associate Dean of the College and Professor of English at Agnes
Scott College in Atlanta, Georgia. He is the author of Understanding Martin Amis (1995,
2004) and the co-editor of Depth of Field: Stanley Kubrick, Film, and the Uses of History
(2006). He has also written essays on Martin Amis, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens,
George Eliot, and John Ruskin.
Brian Finney is Associate Professor in English at California State University, Long
Beach. He taught at London University from 1964-87 and since emigrating to the US at
UCR, UCLA, USC, and CSULB. He has published Since How It Is: A Study of Samuel
Beckett’s Later Fiction (1972); Christopher Isherwood: A Critical Biography (1979),
which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; The Inner Eye: British Literary
Autobiography of the Twentieth Century (1985); a critical study of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons
and Lovers (1990); and, most recently, English Fiction Since 1984: Narrating a Nation
(2006).
M. Hunter Hayes is Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M UniversityCommerce, where he specializes in contemporary British literature. He has published
articles on British fiction and poetry and is completing a book on Will Self. Martin Amis:
An Annotated Bibliography and Critical Checklist, by James Diedrick and M. Hunter
Hayes, is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press.
Gavin Keulks is Associate Professor of English at Western Oregon University, where he
teaches contemporary British and Irish literature. He is the author of Father and Son:
Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British Novel Since 1950 (2003), and in 2006 he
succeeded James Diedrick as the online administrator of the Martin Amis Web. He also
recently completed his first novel, tentatively titled Flight.
Richard Menke is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He has
published essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature in ELH, PMLA, Modern
Fiction Studies, Critical Inquiry, and elsewhere, and is completing a manuscript on
realism and information in Victorian fiction.
Emma Parker is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Leicester and a founding
member of the Contemporary Women Writers Network. She has published essays on
Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Michèle Roberts,
and Graham Swift, and is the author of Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the
Museum: A Reader's Guide (2002) and the editor of Contemporary British Women
Writers (2004).
Philip Tew is Professor of English at Brunel University and Director of the UK Network
for Modern Fiction Studies. He is the author of Jim Crace: A Critical Reading (2006);
The Contemporary British Novel: From John Fowles to Zadie Smith (2004); B.S.
Johnson: A Critical Reading (2001); and the editor—with Richard Lane and Rod
Mengham—of Contemporary British Fiction (2002).
Richard Todd received his Ph.D. from University College London. In 1976 he moved to
The Netherlands and in August 2004 was appointed Professor of British literature after
1500 at the University of Leiden. He has authored Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize
and Fiction in Britain Today (1996), Iris Murdoch (1984), and Iris Murdoch: The
Shakespearian Interest (1979), as well as a short monograph on A.S. Byatt (1997). He
has also published widely on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century lyric verse, with
emphasis on Anglo-Dutch cultural relations in the period ca. 1540-1672.