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: Kerry Myler (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

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 …

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2431 words

Citation: Alber, Jan. "Time's Arrow". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 January 2010 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8356, accessed 03 April 2025.]

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