GENDER RELATIONS IN MARTIN AMIS’S SELECTED NOVELS (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of History Culture and Art Research, 2021
Amis's novels dating the 80s and 90s and portraying mostly the lives of the modern English, more specifically the Londoner, are provocative for the way they represent women. They are sometimes classified as the "ladlit" or at times dismissed all together out of the canon because they confine women mostly in patriarchal cliché female figures, or silence them to an extent that would discard the very existence of women in these texts. Among these ladlits, London Fields strikes the reader at first glance as the ladlit par excellence; yet, the protagonist in the novel is an extraordinary woman, Nicola Six, and her representation in the novel is exceptional in Amis's oeuvre. When this novel is read in relation to another woman-starring Amisian novel, Night Train (1997) which features a hardboiled female detective, the result would be thought-provoking for gender studies across Amis's works. Therefore, in what follows, the way Amis portrays Nicola Six is studied together with another fictional female figure, Mike Hoolihan of the novel Night Train, and the focus of the study is limited to the analysis of the characterization of the protagonists in relation to the concepts of "seeing" and "being seen" together with such mediums of power and the ideology as "the authority" "the author," and "the reality.
The Female Body in Martin Amis’ Money: A Satiric Portrait
as a satiric portrait of the commodification of the female body in the market place. The paper argues that Amis is not misogynistic or anti-feminist, as many critics claim, but anti-capitalist. He uses means of satire to criticise sexual exploitation of young women in the world of trade. The discussion seeks to identify the satiric devices employed by Amis to showcase how women are rendered 'interchangeable goods'. It will be shown in this paper that Amis' primary preoccupation in Money is pornography, as a very profitable industry and as a source of income in contemporary society. Through mockery and satire, Amis illustrates the negative effects of capitalism on the life of the individual and society at large. The discussion concludes with the significance of Amis' satirical mode of representation, which shows that women are merely victims of a greed-driven business world and society.
Cultural Intelligibility and the Individual Performance in Martin Amis’s Night Train
KARE- Uluslararası Edebiyat, Tarih ve Düşünce Dergisi, 2019
Martin Amis, the son of the well-known English novelist Kingsley Amis, is one of the most celebrated novelists of the contemporary English novel and he has written quite impressive books like Money which has been in the list, “All-TIME 100 Novels” by Time, and has been added to the lists, “The 100 Best Novels Written in English” and “The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time” of The Guardian. His 1997 novel, Night Train is quite different in style and narration compared to his previous work, yet it is a significant piece of work because of the remarkable characterization of a protagonist. Although the novel features a detective and the plot is constructed around a process of resolving a case, the portrayal of the woman detective is different from the generic conventions of the genre, the detective novel. Also, as a woman struggling to survive in a traditionally masculine environment, the police force, the protagonist of the novel has to face a great deal of oppression both because of her profession and the patriarchal environment she lives in. Hence, by drawing attention to the theories of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, particularly those about the traditional classification and stratification of individuals based on gender or sex in order to subjugate them after constructing a hierarchical relationship, the purpose of this study is to explore the characterization of the protagonist of Night Train to point out how the oppressive cultural expectations and traditions of patriarchal societies are challenged and also subverted in a work of fiction.
Women Characters and Writers in Contemporary Literature
Women Characters and Writers in Contemporary Literature, 2020
This book is composed of my selected and published academic articles up to now. My main research areas are women characters and violence in the British literature. And in this work you can meet several women characters from the British literature who have inspired a great number of readers. Besides, Nobel Prize awarded women writers from all over the world are also mentioned here. Furthermore, some philosophical theories and mental diseases are discussed in brief.
Killing the Crime Novel: Martin Amis's Night Train , Genre and Literary Fiction
Journal of Modern Literature, 2011
This article explores the encounter between autonomous aesthetics, mass genre and the publishing category of literary fiction in Martin Amis's Night Train. Taking the confused critical response to the novel as a starting point, I argue that the novel confounded the conventions governing the writing, circulation and consumption of contemporary literary fiction. In analyzing the narrative and stylistic strategies Amis deploys in exploiting the conventions of crime writing, I give an account of the relationship between high autonomous aesthetics and mass genre that made Night Train inimical to the category of literary fiction. Putting Amis's term "postmodern decadence" to use as a way of conceptualizing this relationship historically, we are able to reorientate our sense of Amis's place in the cultural field and understand the set of factors that have determined his vexed reputation in contemporary literature.
Identity Crisis in Martin Amis's Money and London Fields
Identity Crisis in Martin Amis's Money and London Fields, 2021
Martin Amis (b.1949) is having a special place in academic and literary circles of his time and according to Encyclopedia Britannica, he is "one of the best-known public intellectuals of the late 20th and early 21st centuries" (Britannica, 2020). Early in his life, he managed to have a distinctive style of writing which, according to Brian Finney (2008), is "to see himself as representative of a generation" who found themselves entrapped by "a drastically deteriorated stage of modernity" (p. 1). This is why his works attract many __________ ________________________________________________