The War Against Cliché
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"According to Martin Amis, the golden era of this mingling of literature and society stretched from 1948, the year that T. S. Eliot published his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture and F. R. Leavis The Great Tradition, until the early Seventies. He attributes its closing to the Opec oil crisis of the early Seventies. The resulting inflation, Amis argues, exposed literary criticism as a 'leisure-class' frippery." --Andrew Anthony reviewing The War Against Cliché |
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The War Against Cliché (2001) is an anthology of essays, book reviews and literary criticism from the British author Martin Amis. Like his previous collection Visiting Mrs. Nabokov, the book is comprised of many pieces written over the course of Amis' career, beginning in the mid-1970's as a journalist and following up to his period of recognition as one of Great Britain's most acclaimed novelists. The book takes its title from one of Amis' essays, an encomium to James Joyce's novel Ulysses. Amis characterizes that novel as Joyce's "campaign against cliche". Among the many authors reviewed are John Updike, Saul Bellow, Iris Murdoch, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Elmore Leonard and Philip Roth. Many of the essays also touch on pet topics of Amis', such as chess, soccer, masculinity, and nuclear weapons.
