Rejuvenation Of Masculinity

Kingsley Amis is an outstanding satirical novelist, has been considered as a member of the"Angry Young Men"group—a group of British writers who bitterly condemned their country's social and political values during the 1950s and 1960s. He is best known for his popular and acclaimed novel, Lucky Jim (1954). Jim Dixon, the most popular anti-hero at that time, does not aspire to be a"gentleman"because he is university-educated but he is against the culture which be labeled as high culture. It means that not only Kingsley Amis but also other Angry Young Men feel something wrong with their culture, they want to change. What Amis actually does in Lucky Jim is to take off the affectations of genteel moral act.There have been a great number of literary criticisms on Lucky Jim. Many the domestic criticisms are from the points of view of the employment of comic and satiric writing style, the sociopolitical background and cultural conflict in Lucky Jim. As for the foreign scholars, they tend to maintain their preference to"modern fiction", written by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. The postwar English novel has not generally received a very enthusiastic press. So one essential purpose of the choosing Lucky Jim as the subject of my thesis is to break the silence and arouse new interest in the study of the postwar English novel in China.The approach of the present thesis, the gender studies in broad sense, is relatively a new one. This thesis got its inspiration from the dissertation written by Susan Brook; in her dissertation she mentioned the living state of the educated men at that time. It was the first time that gender anxiety and regain masculinity were taken into account. But Brook didn't analyze Lucky Jim in the paradigm of gender studies in particular. She focused her analysis on the writing culture of the fifties. So another purpose of the present thesis is to open a new area to comprehend the literary achievements of Angry Young Men by putting Lucky Jim within a paradigm of gender studies as example.In the eyes of Kingsley Amis and lucky Jim, the behaviors of academic authorities loose the attributions that authentic Englishmen should possess. They flout the pseudointellectual demands of academia as a way of rejecting its affectation and hypocrisy in order to show their rebellion against"effeminate"culture of the upper-class. Jim achieves his social success without losing his"ordinary"cultural values, but his rebellion is bound up in a desire for individual success rather than social change. So the finds of this thesis shows that the individual rejuvenation of masculinity as a form of rebellion gets its success, but for the whole society, Kingsley Amis and his character, lucky Jim have their limitations in finding solution to social problems.