The visionary satirical novel: London in British fiction of the 1980s and 1990s.

摘要

This study examines a group of authors who responded to the dynamically transforming metropolitan milieu of the late twentieth century with narratives that bend the realist conventions dominant in post-war British novelistic practice, while offering compelling representations of a city in search of a new identity. These narratives draw on the long literary traditions of satire and visionary fantasy to produce a new generic hybrid: the urban visionary satirical novel. The analysis focuses on the work of Martin Amis, Maggie Gee, China Mieville and Will Self, proposing both a synchronic and diachronic analysis of London's visionary satirical fiction, and placing it within a number of historical and contemporary contexts. London's visionary satirical novels are grouped into three categories, reflecting the dominant paradigms of contemporary urban fantasy: the city of the dead, the city of metamorphosis, and the city of the apocalypse. The first group includes Other People (1981) by Martin Amis and How the Dead Live (2000) by Will Self, both afterlife fantasies that draw on Dante, Blake, Sartre, and the Bardo Thodol to present a dark vision of the contemporary capital and its inhabitants. Novels belonging to the second group, Will Self's Great Apes (1997) and China Mieville's King Rat (1998), represent London as the habitat of sentient simians and rodents, offering a defamiliarizing reexamination of the British metropolis. Finally, London Fields (1989) by Martin Amis and The Burning Book (1984) by Maggie Gee examine the effects of nuclear proliferation on contemporary urban culture.