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 Glasgow), 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

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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.…

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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 20 April 2024.]

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