''The War Against Cliché'' (2001) is an anthology of essays, book reviews and
literary criticism
A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature's ...
from the British author
Martin Amis
Sir Martin Louis Amis (25 August 1949 – 19 May 2023) was an English novelist, essayist, memoirist, screenwriter and critic. He is best known for his novels ''Money'' (1984) and '' London Fields'' (1989). He received the James Tait Black Mem ...
. The collection received the
National Book Critics Circle
The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) is an American nonprofit organization (501(c) organization, 501(c)(3)) with more than 700 members. It is the professional association of American book review editors and critics, known primarily for the N ...
award in 2001.
Title
The book takes its title from one of Amis' essays, an
encomium
''Encomium'' (: ''encomia'') is a Latin word deriving from the Ancient Greek ''enkomion'' (), meaning "the praise of a person or thing." Another Latin equivalent is '' laudatio'', a speech in praise of someone or something.
Originally was the ...
to
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (born James Augusta Joyce; 2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influentia ...
's novel '' Ulysses''. Amis characterizes that novel as Joyce's "campaign against cliché". Amis writes,
To idealise: all writing is a campaign against cliche. Not just cliches of the pen but cliches of the mind and cliches of the heart. When I dispraise, I am usually quoting cliches. When I praise, I am usually quoting the opposed qualities of freshness, energy and reverberation of voice.
Contents
Like Amis's previous collection '' Visiting Mrs Nabokov'', the book is composed of many pieces written over the course of the author's career, beginning in the mid-1970s as a journalist and following up to his period of recognition as one of Great Britain's most acclaimed novelists. Among the many authors considered are
John Updike
John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others being Booth Tar ...
,
Anthony Burgess
John Anthony Burgess Wilson, (; 25 February 1917 – 22 November 1993) who published under the name Anthony Burgess, was an English writer and composer.
Although Burgess was primarily a comic writer, his Utopian and dystopian fiction, dy ...
,
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow (born Solomon Bellows; June 10, 1915April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only write ...
,
Iris Murdoch
Dame Jean Iris Murdoch ( ; 15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her fi ...
,
Elmore Leonard
Elmore John Leonard Jr. (October 11, 1925August 20, 2013) was an American novelist, short story author and screenwriter. He was, according to British journalist Anthony Lane, "hailed as one of the best crime writers in the land". His earliest no ...
and
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth (; March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018) was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophical ...
.
Many of the essays also touch on pet topics of Amis's, such as
chess
Chess is a board game for two players. It is an abstract strategy game that involves Perfect information, no hidden information and no elements of game of chance, chance. It is played on a square chessboard, board consisting of 64 squares arran ...
,
poker
Poker is a family of Card game#Comparing games, comparing card games in which Card player, players betting (poker), wager over which poker hand, hand is best according to that specific game's rules. It is played worldwide, with varying rules i ...
, football,
cue sports
Cue sports are a wide variety of Game of skill, games of skill played with a cue stick, which is used to strike billiard balls and thereby cause them to move around a Baize, cloth-covered billiards table, table bounded by elastic bumpers known a ...
,
masculinity
Masculinity (also called manhood or manliness) is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with men and boys. Masculinity can be theoretically understood as Social construction of gender, socially constructed, and there i ...
, and
nuclear weapons
A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either nuclear fission, fission (fission or atomic bomb) or a combination of fission and nuclear fusion, fusion reactions (thermonuclear weap ...