Whither the Novel?

Abstract

In his novel The Information (1995), British novelist and essayist Martin Amis criticizes the contemporary literary world, through both form and content—its structure and its characters’ ideas. Although the novel presents several postmodernist traits, blurring the limits between its author and its narrator, it mostly deals with the loss of control of the author (and the narrator), and the ever higher efforts that must be made by readers, resulting in commercially successful but low-quality literature being eventually more read than the literary works usually accepted by the academic canon. This direction may open the discussion about the fate of literature as viewed by writers themselves.