Martin Amis, Time's Arrow

Jan Alber (Universität Freiburg)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain , 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Gina Lyle (University of York), Graham MacPhee (University of Manchester), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Jenni Ramone (The Nottingham Trent University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1991

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Metafiction
Novel

Resources

Save to Bookshelf

Martin Amis’s novel

Time’s Arrow

can be defined, at one level, as an “unnatural narrative” (Alber 2009) because intradiegetic time (time within the story) moves backwards. Many narratives confront us with retrogressive temporalities (Richardson 2002: 49-50), among which one can mention Elizabeth Jane Howard’s novel

The Long View

(1956), Charles Hubert Sisson’s novel

Christopher Homm

(1965), Tom Stoppard’s play

Artist Descending a Staircase

(1972), Don DeLillo’s novel

Underworld

(1997) and Christopher Nolan’s film

Memento

(2001). In most of these cases of reversed time the narrative discourse represents a chronological sequence of events in such a way that we gradually move backwards in time, while the individual sections themselves preserve a regular chronology, i.e.…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

2431 words

Citation: Alber, Jan. "Time's Arrow". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 January 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8356, accessed 19 December 2024.]

Martin Amis, Time's Arrow

Dates

Places

Genres and Modes

Resources

Save this article

Leave Feedback