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Larkin, Nabokov, and Others
On this page I have created links to writers
with important connections to Amis (for more on these connections, consult Understanding
Martin Amis, by James Diedrick. Some are oft-acknowledged influences (Bellow, Larkin,
Nabokov); others are friends (Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens); others are contemporary American writers
whose preoccupations and narrative devices often parallel Amis's own (Don DeLillo, Philip
Roth).
I begin with links to the three
nineteenth-century writers whose voices can often be heard echoing in the margins of
Amis's own novels: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Austen's
importance to Amis is especially important to emphasize, since he so often implies in his
own criticism that the house of fiction is an exclusively male domain. Yet his own
hard-edged comedies of ill-manners are inconveivable without the precedent and example of
the great Jane Austen--as his own essay "Miss Jane's Prime" implicitly
acknowledges. And while Dickens's influence is everywhere apparent in Amis's work,
Stevenson's importance is less often remarked. Both writers, however, are preoccupied with
doubles and doubling; both Other People and Time's Arrow evoke and
extend the haunting mental landscape of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Nineteenth-Century Influences:
Twentieth-Century Affinities:
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Site maintained by James Diedrick,
author of
Understanding Martin Amis, 2nd edition (2004).
All contents © 2004.
Last updated
10 December, 2004.
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