JAMES, Andrew Stanley    Department   Undergraduate School  , School of Commerce    Position   Professor
Language	English
Publication Date	2013/05
Type	Book
Title	Kingsley Amis: Antimodels and the Audience
Contribution Type	Sole-authored
Publisher	McGill-Queen's University Press
Details	While it has become commonplace to discount British poet and novelist Kingsley Amis as a "naive realist," a mere comedic novelist, even a misogynist and failed moralist, this book argues that Amis was seriously concerned with the role of the artist in society and explored this subject in many of his works. Throughout the first twenty years of his career, Amis used bad artists as whimsical characters, or antimodels, that helped identify his artistic preferences and fictional techniques. He became convinced that the relationship between an artist and his audience was reciprocal and that both the outer audience and the artist's inner circle must be held accountable for the production of poor literature. During the last twenty years of his career, Amis no longer concerned himself with satirizing bad artists, but instead explored ways of ameliorating them. This book shows that the development of antimodels as fully drawn characters and Amis's insistence upon reciprocity in the writer-reader relationship demonstrate that he was more than just a comedic writer, and was aware of himself as an artist with social responsibilities.
ISBN	978-0-7735-4136-8