Includes bibliographical references (p. [255]-264) and index.
Contents:
Part I. 1946-1969 : exposing flaws in antimodels and formative influences. Exploring critical misinterpretations and the roots of antimodels -- Lessons of The legacy, a comparison with Wain, and the development of a narrative voice in Lucky Jim -- Defining the self: writing against Dylan Thomas and Philip Larkin in That uncertain feeling -- Lessons in storytelling: Graham Greene, modernism, and I like it here -- Experiments in content: William Empson, ambiguity, and Take a girl like you -- Evelyn Waugh, Charles Algernon Swinburne, and Englishness in One fat Englishman -- Limitations of the provincial aesthetic in Amis's poetry: witnesses, moral provocateurs, and The Evans country -- New reasons to write: entertainment and the inner audience in The Egyptologists, The Anti-Death League, and I want it now -- Part 2. 1969-1995 : towards reciprocity and balance. Looking into the artistic future: The green man, Girl, 20, Ending up, and The alteration -- Problems with language and balance: Jake's thing, Stanley and the women, and Russian hide-and-seek -- Resolving creative problems: The old devils, Different with girls, The folks that live on the hill, and The Russian girl -- Final creative self-definitions: You can't do both and The biographer's moustache.
Summary:
Throughout the first twenty years of his career, Amis used bad artists as whimsical characters, or antimodels, that helped identify his artistic preferences and fictional techniques. He became convinced that the relationship between an artist and his audience was reciprocal and that both the outer audience and the artist's inner circle must be held accountable for the production of poor literature. During the last twenty years of his career, Amis no longer concerned himself with satirizing bad artists, but instead explored ways of ameliorating them. James shows that the development of antimodels as fully drawn characters and Amis's insistence upon reciprocity in the writer-reader relationship demonstrate that he was more than just a comedic writer, and was aware of himself as an artist with social responsibilities. -- Book Jacket.
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