Many of the essays below are exclusive to The Martin Amis Web and have been made available in both MS Word and PDF formats. Due to copyright restrictions, other essays cannot be hosted on The Martin Amis Web. However, a wealth of scholarly work is available for free download -- through university or public library membership -- through JSTOR and EBSCO Host.
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Jump to Essays and Excerpts
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Monographs and Collections
Given the crushing economies of academic publishing, I have elected to link to the publishers of the following books rather than their online booksellers. For a comprehensive list of chapters featuring Amis in other books, consult James Diedrick's Understanding Martin Amis.
Martin Amis (Routledge Guides to Literature)
by Brian Finney. New York: Routledge, 2008. Read an excerpt from chapter one here (pdf).
Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Martin Amis and seeking not only a guide to his works but also a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds them.
Brian Finney is associate professor of English at California State Long Beach.
Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond
Edited by Gavin Keulks. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
View the Table of Contents and List of Contributors
"This collection represents a real advance in Martin Amis studies. Twelve informed and exciting essays by an international range of leading Amis scholars ... provide a rich source of fresh insights and perspectives. In a theoretically sophisticated but accessible way, they examine the structure, language and significance of his work and its controversial engagements with postmodernity, class, gender and the Holocaust.... This book is essential reading for all those interested in Amis and contemporary writing." Nicolas Tredell, University of Sussex; editor of The Fiction of Martin Amis
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by James Diedrick. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. Revised and Expanded Second Edited, 2004.
About the Author: James Diedrick was formerly the Howard L. McGregor Professor of the Humanities at Albion College, and is now Associate Dean of the College and Professor of English at Agnes Scott College. He collaborated with Amis in compiling and editing Amis's nonfiction collection The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971–2000, which won the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. |
Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British Novel Since 1950
by Gavin Keulks. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
About the Author: Gavin Keulks is associate professor of English at Western Oregon University, where he specializes in British and Irish literature of the twentieth century, especially the post-World War II period. He is also the administrator of the Martin Amis Web and editor of the volume of critical essays, Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond (above).
The Fiction of Martin Amis: A Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism
Edited by Nicolas Tredell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
Publisher's Description: "Nicolas Tredell explores the critical judgements and interpretations generated by Amis's novels and short stories over the past quarter of a century. Drawing on reviews, essays, interviews, and books, it brings together material on Amis which has never previously been collected and provides the most wide-ranging examination of his fiction so far."
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Martians, Monsters, and Madonnas: Fiction and Form in the World of Martin Amis by John A. Dern. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.
Publisher's Synopsis: "The burgeoning postmodern condition forces a reevaluation of the novel as a form; contemporary formlessness has created a new and seemingly endless range of interpretations under which the forms of the past coalesce.... Style has overcome story in the world of Martin Amis - and perhaps in the 'real' world as well." |
Essays and Excerpts
"Life and Other Genres: Martin Amis's The Pregnant Widow." By Brian Finney.
"Lessons in humiliation in three mystery novels: Martin Amis’ Money, The Information and Night Train." By Elsa Simões. Proceedings of the APEAA Conference, 2008. PDF
"The Middle Years of Martin Amis." By Joseph Brooker, in Rod Mengham and Philip Tew (eds.) British Fiction Today, London and New York: Continuum, 2006, 3-14. LINK | PDF
"Attaboy!: Martin Amis’s ‘The Last Days of Muhammad Atta’ and ‘The Age of Horrorism,’"
By Susie Thomas and Jesse Thomas. Rising East 4 (Multiculturalism and the 'war on terror' issue). May 2006. LINK | PDF
Excerpts from The Life of Kingsley Amis, by Zachary Leader. The Daily Mail, 5-7 November 2006. LINK1 | LINK2 | LINK3 | PDF1 | PDF2 | PDF3
"Nihilism or Nonsense? The Postmodern Fiction of Martin Amis and Haruki Murakami"
By Wendy Jones Nakanishi. Electronic Journal of Contemporary Japanese Studies (8 May 2006). LINK | PDF
"The Tarnished Mirror of the World: London in the intertextual web of Martin Amis's London Fields" By Zia Gluhbegovich. Literary London Journal 2.2 (September 2004)
LINK | PDF
"Posing as a Postmodernist: Race and Class in Martin Amis's London Fields" By Susie Thomas. Literary London Journal 1.2 (September 2003). LINK | PDF
"The Amises on Realism and Postmodernism: Stanley and the Women and Money"
By Gavin Keulks, excerpt from Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British Novel Since 1950 (2003). WORD | PDF
"What's Amis in Contemporary British Fiction? Martin Amis's Money and Time's Arrow" (1999) by Brian Finney, California State University, Long Beach. LINK | PDF
"Tracing Time's Arrow" WORD | PDF
By James Diedrick, excerpt from Understanding Martin Amis (1995)
"Notes from the Urban Underground: Money" WORD | PDF
By James Diedrick, excerpt from Understanding Martin Amis (1995)
"Narrative and Narrated Homicide in Martin Amis's Other People and London Fields,"
from Critique 37 (1995). By Brian Finney, California State University, Long Beach.
"Allegory and Allegoresis in Money" (1993). By Tamas Benyei, Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary. WORD | PDF
"Martin, Karl and Maggie Too: Political Discourse in Martin Amis's Other People."
By Stephen Jones, Department of English Studies, University of Strathclyde. PDF
Dissertations, Theses, and Seminar Essays
"Prodigal: the Amis Dynasty and the Anxiety of Influence" (2012). By Raiph Romans, Edinburgh Napier University. Undergraduate Honors Thesis. WORD
"British Author-Autobiography: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Elizabeth Jane Howard" (2009). By Verena Gappmaier, University of Vienna, Master's Thesis. ABSTRACT | FULL
"'My Sentence is for Open War': Schizophrenia, Meritocracy and the Style of Martin Amis" (2006). By Kevin Crowley, Oxford University. Undergraduate Thesis. WORD
"Apocalyptic Communities: The Disaster and Revelation of Class and Space" (2006).
By Nicole LaRose, University of Florida. Excerpt, Ph.D. Dissertation. WORD | PDF
"'The project is to become an American novelist': Martin Amis's special relationship with the United States" (2004). By Richard Martin, University College London. Graduate Essay. WORD | PDF
"'Nothing will come of nothing': Negotiating the postmodern in Martin Amis' Night Train" (2003). By Will Norman, Oxford University. Graduate Essay. WORD | PDF
"Cynicism as an Ethic and Aesthetic Principle. A Study of Martin Amis's Fiction. With Special Emphasis on Dead Babies, Time's Arrow, and Career Move" (2001). By Kurt Leutgeb, University of Vienna. Masters Thesis. WORD
"The Reader in London Fields." An In-Depth Analysis of London Fields, Emphasizing the Play Between Text and Reader and the Consequent Implications for Narrative Authority (2000). By Bo A. Græsborg and Thorbjørn Lind, Aalborg University, Denmark. Master's Thesis. WORD | PDF
"Like Father Like Son? The Fiction of Kingsley and Martin Amis" (1998). By Stuart Kerr, Royal Holloway University, London. Undergraduate Thesis. WORD | PDF
"The Satirical Theater of the Female Body: The Role of Women in Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, and Money: A Suicide Note" (1998). By Robert Martinez, College of William and Mary. Undergraduate Senior Research Project. WORD | PDF
"The Artist Manque: Nabokovian Techniques in Money" (1997). By Matthew Dessem, Williams College. Undergraduate Essay. WORD | PDF