Parody In Martin Amis’ S London Fields

Martin Amis is an outstanding British postmodern writer and London Fields,one of his masterpieces, is an apocalyptic metafiction. London Fields not only concerns literary writing but also deals with the decay and sordidness of the present society.In London Fields, parody is found to be skillfully used by Martin but receives insufficient attention. With Linda Hutcheon’s contribution, parody is used not only with the past sense of ridicule and mock, but also for a serious purpose of today, going beyond the textual structure confinement into the world linked with society, history and ideology. Based on Hutcheon’s theory, this thesis examines the parody in London Fields from the perspectives of courtly love, pornography,Oedipus complex and plagiarism in depth. In doing so, postmodern attitude towards modern epistemology, and the author’s concerns with death of the narrative and death of love are touched upon.Thus, the frequently employed parody in this postmodern work is not only a simple narrative technique aiming to provoke laughter but actually a powerful instrument for the author to either satirize the crisis-ridden postmodern society caused by the previous worship of rationalism or express his own deep thoughts on literature and the future of the world.