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.