The Postmodern City of Dreadful Night

The city, especially London, is undoubtedly one of §the favourite themes in British fiction of the last §two decades of the twentieth century. Writers such §as Ackroyd, Sinclair, Self, Kureishi, Carter and §others have expressed their attitude to the §metropolis in their novels, short stories, non-§fiction and film scripts. The diversity and §versatility of the urban milieu are reflected by §these writers multifarious treatments of the theme, §and so the city comes to life again and again in §both its real as well as fictional forms. Moreover, §these two forms become hardly distinguishable and §thus mutually interchangeable as the realistic §aspects of the city perpetually intertwine with the §fictitious. This work attempts to show how the city, §as both theme and setting, is used by Martin Amis §and Ian McEwan in their selected novels written, §with one exception, during the 1980s and 90s. In §order to provide theoretical and historical §contexts, chapters providing a brief outline of the §city as the writer s object of interest since the §late nineteenth century and dealing with Amis s and §McEwan s characteristic narrative strategies are §also included.