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Annotation An innovative study of two of England's most popular, controversial, and influential writers,Father and Sonbreaks new ground in examining the relationship between Kingsley Amis and his son, Martin Amis. Through intertextual readings of their essays and novels, Gavin Keulks examines how the Amises' work negotiated the boundaries of their personal relationship while claiming territory in the literary debate between mimesis and modernist aesthetics. Theirs was a battle over the nature of reality itself, a twentieth-century realism war conducted by loving family members and rival, antithetical writers. Keulks argues that the Amises' relationship functioned as a source of literary inspiration and that their work illuminates many of the structural and stylistic shifts that have characterized the British novel since 1950 The Amises, tradition, and influence: genealogical dissent -- Brief anecdotal history: the mid-1980s and mid-1990s -- Tradition, influence, and anxiety -- Realism and revaluation -- I: Critical cartography: charting the artistic allegiances -- 1. The Amises on American literature: Nabokov, Bellow, Roth -- Vladimir Nabokov: style as morality -- Saul Bellow: prophetic realism -- Philip Roth: egocentric narration -- 2. The Amises on English literature: Austen, Waugh, Larkin -- Jane Austen: mannered morality -- Evelyn Waugh: decline and fall -- Philip Larkin: the comedy of candor -- II: Influence and intersection: the interplay of individual works -- 3. The Amises on comedy: Lucky Jim and the Rachel papers -- Lucky Jim: cultural and generational conflict -- The Rachel papers: revaluative inversion and critique -- "The two Amises" -- 4. The Amises on satire: ending up and dead babies -- Henry Fielding and Horatian satire -- Mikhail Bakhtin and menippean satire -- Characterization and closure -- 5. The Amises on realism and postmodernism: Stanley and the women and money: a suicide note -- Chauvinism, feminism, and misogyny -- The autobiographical abyss: Jake's thing and Stanley and the women -- Revaluative reminism? Money, misogyny, and doubling -- The Amises, realism, and postmodernism -- Revaluative realism: money and metamimesis -- 6. The Amises on love, death, and children: the letters of Kinsley Amis and experience: a memoir -- Higher autobiography: experience, midlife crisis, and the unconscious -- Personal realignment: hilly redux -- Professional realignment: the old devils -- Personal realignment: experience -- Projecting a future: the Amises, genealogical dissent, and the British novel since 1950 -- Whither and novel? Realism, postmodernism, and beyond -- After Kingsley: Martin Amis and the event horizons of fiction -- Professional realignment? Love, children, and night train.
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