Modern Allegorical Features Of London Fields

Martin Amis, a distinguished contemporary British novelist, is well acknowledged as a virtuoso of literary style and an important postmodern experimentalist London Fields is commonly referred to be one of Amis’s "London Trilogy" upon which Amis built up his fame. Ever since its publication in 1989, it has widely attracted the attention of the public and the critics. It has been studied mainly from the perspective of the theme of death, the postmodern narrative devices and the interactive relationship between text, reader and author and so on, while the modern allegorical features are not yet systematically studied so far.Modern allegory is one of the most influencing theories by Walter Benjamin. This thesis aims at analyzing the modern allegorical features of London Fields, concentrating on the four intrinsic features, namely its multiplicity of meaning, fragmentation, melancholy as well as redemption, in the light of Walter Benjamin’s theory of modern allegory. The multiplicity of meaning is explored from two aspects, the multi-themes of discourse and the bi-ideographic structure of the outward comedy and the underlying tragedy. Fragmentation, the most dominating characteristics of modern allegory, is mainly manifested from three aspects:the ruined world, the fragmented characters and the fragmentary discourse. Finally, melancholy and redemption have been analyzed to interpret the spiritual essence of London Fields. The novel is thus read as an allegory that mirrors the reality metaphorically, and Martin Amis is regarded as a humanistic novelist holding profound concerns on the destiny of human beings.