Zachary Leader, in the last chapter of his bulky new biography of Amis, is encouraged by his subject's prospects for literary immortality, noting that a brief posthumous "falling off" of public interest seems to have ended, and that "all Amis's novels will soon be in print, either in Penguin or Vintage paperbacks".
You could say the author is simultaneously confronting biological time, his mortality, and what you could call "archival time," the prospect of some posthumous literary life, or the foreclosure of that prospect.
The novel's protagonists are a contrasted pair of writers: thoughtful Edwin Reardon, a shy "literary" novelist with few commercial prospects; and Jasper Milvain, a hard-driving young journalist who treats his writing as the means to an end in a ruthless literary marketplace.
But Bigelow found enough literary ore to keep him prospecting.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics, with its entropic vision of a running-down universe aeons and aeons hence, may seem an impossibly remote prospect for a literary sensibility to focus on productively.
Instead, they afford publishers, editors, scholars and critics the prospect of delivering restorative literary justice while providing readers an intimate exposure to great writers' first plans and frustrated hopes for their eventual masterpieces.
DJ Taylor, welcoming Areté's arrival, realistically summed up its prospects against the history of literary magazines.
Which is why Literary speed-dating is such an exciting prospect for a bookish single.
Of course, these are only lists, and 100 titles is a tough call, but as a vision of a future literary library it's scarcely an inspiring prospect.
Unfortunately for Dr Pollock, it seems it takes the prospect of kids studying a literary work by Meera Syal to draw the Twitterati's ireful focus, and rugby remains completely legal in this nation's schools.
