Natasha Alden
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780719088933
- eISBN:
- 9781781706367
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719088933.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Explores McEwan’s use of historical source material in ‘Atonement’, focussing on how he used memoirs, letters and the Imperial War Museum archives to explore the lives of soldiers and nurses. ...
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Explores McEwan’s use of historical source material in ‘Atonement’, focussing on how he used memoirs, letters and the Imperial War Museum archives to explore the lives of soldiers and nurses. Compares the exploration of the past in the novel to the exploration McEwan himself undertook.Less
Explores McEwan’s use of historical source material in ‘Atonement’, focussing on how he used memoirs, letters and the Imperial War Museum archives to explore the lives of soldiers and nurses. Compares the exploration of the past in the novel to the exploration McEwan himself undertook.
Dominic Head
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719066566
- eISBN:
- 9781781701027
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719066566.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This volume analyzes the works of British novelist Ian McEwan. It considers the problematic claim that McEwan is possibly the most significant of a number of writers who have resuscitated the link ...
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This volume analyzes the works of British novelist Ian McEwan. It considers the problematic claim that McEwan is possibly the most significant of a number of writers who have resuscitated the link between morality and the novel for a whole generation, in ways that befit the historical pressures of their time. Some of McEwan's works reviewed in this volume include The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers and The Child in Time.Less
This volume analyzes the works of British novelist Ian McEwan. It considers the problematic claim that McEwan is possibly the most significant of a number of writers who have resuscitated the link between morality and the novel for a whole generation, in ways that befit the historical pressures of their time. Some of McEwan's works reviewed in this volume include The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers and The Child in Time.
Dominic Head
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719066566
- eISBN:
- 9781781701027
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719066566.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter analyzes the literature of shock embodied in Ian McEwan's novel The Cement Garden. It suggests that the cement garden is a clear metaphor for the urban desolation of the character of ...
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This chapter analyzes the literature of shock embodied in Ian McEwan's novel The Cement Garden. It suggests that the cement garden is a clear metaphor for the urban desolation of the character of Jack and his siblings. This chapter also contends that situation of the protagonists in the novel has a parallel in the situation of the novelist and argues that the significant stylistic feature between the character and author is McEwan's response not just to the anomie of contemporary society, but also to the novelistic tradition into which he is writing himself.Less
This chapter analyzes the literature of shock embodied in Ian McEwan's novel The Cement Garden. It suggests that the cement garden is a clear metaphor for the urban desolation of the character of Jack and his siblings. This chapter also contends that situation of the protagonists in the novel has a parallel in the situation of the novelist and argues that the significant stylistic feature between the character and author is McEwan's response not just to the anomie of contemporary society, but also to the novelistic tradition into which he is writing himself.
Dominic Head
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719066566
- eISBN:
- 9781781701027
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719066566.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter examines Ian McEwan's novel The Comfort of Strangers and his screenplay for the film The Imitation Game. It explains that the film is McEwan's first explicit engagement of feminism and ...
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This chapter examines Ian McEwan's novel The Comfort of Strangers and his screenplay for the film The Imitation Game. It explains that the film is McEwan's first explicit engagement of feminism and it is most notable for enacting a dialogue between two overlapping strands of feminism: the emergent feminism of the wartime era, viewed through the lens of 1970s feminism. The novel addresses the problematic relationship between values, ideas and literature and it shows that the author is unable, as yet, to generate vital social resonances through the medium of fiction. This work is perhaps his most disturbing book, with its emphasis on violence and psychosis.Less
This chapter examines Ian McEwan's novel The Comfort of Strangers and his screenplay for the film The Imitation Game. It explains that the film is McEwan's first explicit engagement of feminism and it is most notable for enacting a dialogue between two overlapping strands of feminism: the emergent feminism of the wartime era, viewed through the lens of 1970s feminism. The novel addresses the problematic relationship between values, ideas and literature and it shows that the author is unable, as yet, to generate vital social resonances through the medium of fiction. This work is perhaps his most disturbing book, with its emphasis on violence and psychosis.
Dominic Head
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719066566
- eISBN:
- 9781781701027
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719066566.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter analyzes Ian McEwan's The Child in Time, his first fiction to be clearly longer than novella length and his first sustained attempt at a social novel. It suggests that this work can be ...
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This chapter analyzes Ian McEwan's The Child in Time, his first fiction to be clearly longer than novella length and his first sustained attempt at a social novel. It suggests that this work can be considered a ‘Condition of England novel’ in some respects because of its projection of a fourth or fifth-term Thatcherite government becoming increasingly authoritarian. This chapter also discusses McEwan's sources in popular science to show how a post-Einsteinian conception of the plasticity of time and space allows the central character to intervene in the past and guarantee his own future.Less
This chapter analyzes Ian McEwan's The Child in Time, his first fiction to be clearly longer than novella length and his first sustained attempt at a social novel. It suggests that this work can be considered a ‘Condition of England novel’ in some respects because of its projection of a fourth or fifth-term Thatcherite government becoming increasingly authoritarian. This chapter also discusses McEwan's sources in popular science to show how a post-Einsteinian conception of the plasticity of time and space allows the central character to intervene in the past and guarantee his own future.
Dominic Head
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719066566
- eISBN:
- 9781781701027
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719066566.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter analyzes Ian McEwan's testing of scientific rationalism in his novel Enduring Love. Underpinning this testing of character is McEwan's larger literary project, to consider the function ...
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This chapter analyzes Ian McEwan's testing of scientific rationalism in his novel Enduring Love. Underpinning this testing of character is McEwan's larger literary project, to consider the function of the novel when set against the claims of post-Darwinian science about the evolutionary basis of morality and judgement. This novel implicitly stages a contest of the relative merits of science and literature, as a careful fusion of form and content, contained within a suspense novel. It also shows humanity to be at a stage of evolution and/or social complexity that puts us out of the evolutionary loop, and that demands of us an ethical sense that addresses the problem of self-interest with acute self-consciousness.Less
This chapter analyzes Ian McEwan's testing of scientific rationalism in his novel Enduring Love. Underpinning this testing of character is McEwan's larger literary project, to consider the function of the novel when set against the claims of post-Darwinian science about the evolutionary basis of morality and judgement. This novel implicitly stages a contest of the relative merits of science and literature, as a careful fusion of form and content, contained within a suspense novel. It also shows humanity to be at a stage of evolution and/or social complexity that puts us out of the evolutionary loop, and that demands of us an ethical sense that addresses the problem of self-interest with acute self-consciousness.
Martin Randall
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748638529
- eISBN:
- 9780748651825
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748638529.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This book explores the fiction, poetry, theatre and cinema that have represented the 9/11 attacks. Works by Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Don DeLillo, Simon Armitage and Mohsin Hamid are discussed in ...
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This book explores the fiction, poetry, theatre and cinema that have represented the 9/11 attacks. Works by Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Don DeLillo, Simon Armitage and Mohsin Hamid are discussed in relation to the specific problems of writing about such a visually spectacular ‘event’ that has had enormous global implications. Other chapters analyse initial responses to 9/11, the intriguing tensions between fiction and non-fiction, the challenge of describing traumatic history and the ways in which the terrorist attacks have been discussed culturally in the decade since September 11. The book: contributes to the growing literature on 9/11, presenting an overview of some of the main texts that have represented the attacks and their aftermath; focuses on Don DeLillo, adding to the literature surrounding this major American novelist; focuses on Martin Amis, adding to the growing critical work on this much-discussed British novelist and essayist; and provides a critical analysis of the Oscar-winning film Man on Wire, regarding its oblique references to 9/11.Less
This book explores the fiction, poetry, theatre and cinema that have represented the 9/11 attacks. Works by Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Don DeLillo, Simon Armitage and Mohsin Hamid are discussed in relation to the specific problems of writing about such a visually spectacular ‘event’ that has had enormous global implications. Other chapters analyse initial responses to 9/11, the intriguing tensions between fiction and non-fiction, the challenge of describing traumatic history and the ways in which the terrorist attacks have been discussed culturally in the decade since September 11. The book: contributes to the growing literature on 9/11, presenting an overview of some of the main texts that have represented the attacks and their aftermath; focuses on Don DeLillo, adding to the literature surrounding this major American novelist; focuses on Martin Amis, adding to the growing critical work on this much-discussed British novelist and essayist; and provides a critical analysis of the Oscar-winning film Man on Wire, regarding its oblique references to 9/11.
Sophie Ratcliffe
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780199239870
- eISBN:
- 9780191716799
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199239870.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
The epilogue examines some of the current ideas about sympathy and reading, and its relation to empathy and altruism, in contemporary discourse, looking at arguments by Hilary Mantel, Ian McEwan, ...
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The epilogue examines some of the current ideas about sympathy and reading, and its relation to empathy and altruism, in contemporary discourse, looking at arguments by Hilary Mantel, Ian McEwan, Ruth Padel, Jane Smiley, and Geoffrey Hill. The epilogue concludes by arguing against the implied association between empathy, sympathy, reading and moral virtue.Less
The epilogue examines some of the current ideas about sympathy and reading, and its relation to empathy and altruism, in contemporary discourse, looking at arguments by Hilary Mantel, Ian McEwan, Ruth Padel, Jane Smiley, and Geoffrey Hill. The epilogue concludes by arguing against the implied association between empathy, sympathy, reading and moral virtue.
Dominic Head
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719066566
- eISBN:
- 9781781701027
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719066566.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter analyzes Ian McEwan's Atonement as the creative equivalent or counterpart of narrative ethics. The theme of guilt and atonement is inextricably linked to an investigation of the writer's ...
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This chapter analyzes Ian McEwan's Atonement as the creative equivalent or counterpart of narrative ethics. The theme of guilt and atonement is inextricably linked to an investigation of the writer's authority, a process of self-critique conducted through the creation of the writing persona Briony Tallis. This novel establishes a position that represents a mid-ground between the privileging of the autonomous speaking subject and the dissolution of self into larger social and linguistic codes and it evokes a strong sense of lived experience that is morally moving, and yet insists on the constructed nature of fiction and the morally dubious authority wielded by the writer.Less
This chapter analyzes Ian McEwan's Atonement as the creative equivalent or counterpart of narrative ethics. The theme of guilt and atonement is inextricably linked to an investigation of the writer's authority, a process of self-critique conducted through the creation of the writing persona Briony Tallis. This novel establishes a position that represents a mid-ground between the privileging of the autonomous speaking subject and the dissolution of self into larger social and linguistic codes and it evokes a strong sense of lived experience that is morally moving, and yet insists on the constructed nature of fiction and the morally dubious authority wielded by the writer.
Dominic Head
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719066566
- eISBN:
- 9781781701027
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719066566.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter examines the character and circumstance in Ian McEwan's novel Saturday. It shows that this novel's treatment of the competing claims of literature and medicine is more thoroughgoing than ...
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This chapter examines the character and circumstance in Ian McEwan's novel Saturday. It shows that this novel's treatment of the competing claims of literature and medicine is more thoroughgoing than Atonement, even though still more extravagant claims for the literary are pressed, and also questioned. This novel implies a new form of social accountability in the light of advances in genetic science and considers a new model of responsibility.Less
This chapter examines the character and circumstance in Ian McEwan's novel Saturday. It shows that this novel's treatment of the competing claims of literature and medicine is more thoroughgoing than Atonement, even though still more extravagant claims for the literary are pressed, and also questioned. This novel implies a new form of social accountability in the light of advances in genetic science and considers a new model of responsibility.
Dominic Head
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719066566
- eISBN:
- 9781781701027
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719066566.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
In this survey, Ian McEwan emerges as one of those rare writers whose works have received both popular and critical acclaim. His novels grace the bestseller lists, and he is well regarded by critics, ...
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In this survey, Ian McEwan emerges as one of those rare writers whose works have received both popular and critical acclaim. His novels grace the bestseller lists, and he is well regarded by critics, both as a stylist and as a serious thinker about the function and capacities of narrative fiction. McEwan's novels treat issues that are central to our times: politics, and the promotion of vested interests; male violence and the problem of gender relations; science and the limits of rationality; nature and ecology; love and innocence; and the quest for an ethical worldview. Yet he is also an economical stylist: McEwan's readers are called upon to attend, not just to the grand themes, but also to the precision of his spare writing. Although McEwan's later works are more overtly political, more humane, and more ostentatiously literary than the early work, this book uncovers the continuity as well as the sense of evolution through the oeuvre. It makes the case for McEwan's prominence—pre-eminence, even—in the canon of contemporary British novelists.Less
In this survey, Ian McEwan emerges as one of those rare writers whose works have received both popular and critical acclaim. His novels grace the bestseller lists, and he is well regarded by critics, both as a stylist and as a serious thinker about the function and capacities of narrative fiction. McEwan's novels treat issues that are central to our times: politics, and the promotion of vested interests; male violence and the problem of gender relations; science and the limits of rationality; nature and ecology; love and innocence; and the quest for an ethical worldview. Yet he is also an economical stylist: McEwan's readers are called upon to attend, not just to the grand themes, but also to the precision of his spare writing. Although McEwan's later works are more overtly political, more humane, and more ostentatiously literary than the early work, this book uncovers the continuity as well as the sense of evolution through the oeuvre. It makes the case for McEwan's prominence—pre-eminence, even—in the canon of contemporary British novelists.
Martin Randall
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748638529
- eISBN:
- 9780748651825
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748638529.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter discusses Ian McEwan's Beyond Belief, and the novelists' initial responses to the events of 9/11. 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11 and Don DeLillo's ‘In the Ruins of the ...
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This chapter discusses Ian McEwan's Beyond Belief, and the novelists' initial responses to the events of 9/11. 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11 and Don DeLillo's ‘In the Ruins of the Future’ are also studied in this chapter. These three works are good examples of the early literary responses to 9/11. The chapter concludes that one can discern a development from McEwan's and DeLillo's impassioned and politically intemperate essays, to the more personal and mournful work in 110 Stories, and that geographical and temporal proximity play a major part in the ways writers approached the subject.Less
This chapter discusses Ian McEwan's Beyond Belief, and the novelists' initial responses to the events of 9/11. 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11 and Don DeLillo's ‘In the Ruins of the Future’ are also studied in this chapter. These three works are good examples of the early literary responses to 9/11. The chapter concludes that one can discern a development from McEwan's and DeLillo's impassioned and politically intemperate essays, to the more personal and mournful work in 110 Stories, and that geographical and temporal proximity play a major part in the ways writers approached the subject.
Amir Eshel
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226924953
- eISBN:
- 9780226924960
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226924960.003.0014
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter examines the following works: Ian McEwan's Black Dogs, J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans, and Ian McEwan's Atonement. These works, written twenty ...
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This chapter examines the following works: Ian McEwan's Black Dogs, J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans, and Ian McEwan's Atonement. These works, written twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, assess the magnitude of the events labeled “1989”.Less
This chapter examines the following works: Ian McEwan's Black Dogs, J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans, and Ian McEwan's Atonement. These works, written twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, assess the magnitude of the events labeled “1989”.
Berthold Schoene
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748638154
- eISBN:
- 9780748651795
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748638154.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter discusses Ian McEwan's works that capture the sensibility of a newly emergent Anglo-British contemporaneity. The first is Black Dogs, which explores a fundamentally European sense of ...
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This chapter discusses Ian McEwan's works that capture the sensibility of a newly emergent Anglo-British contemporaneity. The first is Black Dogs, which explores a fundamentally European sense of belonging, but still remains preoccupied with Europe's dark past instead of its post-1989 moment of elated reunification. The second work is Saturday, which presents the life of a successful London neurosurgeon during a day of global rallying against the approaching Iraq War.Less
This chapter discusses Ian McEwan's works that capture the sensibility of a newly emergent Anglo-British contemporaneity. The first is Black Dogs, which explores a fundamentally European sense of belonging, but still remains preoccupied with Europe's dark past instead of its post-1989 moment of elated reunification. The second work is Saturday, which presents the life of a successful London neurosurgeon during a day of global rallying against the approaching Iraq War.
Dominic Head
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719066566
- eISBN:
- 9781781701027
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719066566.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter examines Ian McEwan's ‘Amsterdam’, a Booker Prize-winning novella. It explains that this novel was considered as an inferior Booker winner and reappraises it as an accomplished satirical ...
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This chapter examines Ian McEwan's ‘Amsterdam’, a Booker Prize-winning novella. It explains that this novel was considered as an inferior Booker winner and reappraises it as an accomplished satirical novella. This social satire is conducted through the portraits of the characters of newspaper editor Vernon Halliday and composer Clive Linley, projected as representative of the professional achievers of the Thatcher-Major era. This satire is not consistent in its comic effects and it bleeds out into the contemporary world of literary culture, the culture of which this smartly composed novella is a self-conscious product.Less
This chapter examines Ian McEwan's ‘Amsterdam’, a Booker Prize-winning novella. It explains that this novel was considered as an inferior Booker winner and reappraises it as an accomplished satirical novella. This social satire is conducted through the portraits of the characters of newspaper editor Vernon Halliday and composer Clive Linley, projected as representative of the professional achievers of the Thatcher-Major era. This satire is not consistent in its comic effects and it bleeds out into the contemporary world of literary culture, the culture of which this smartly composed novella is a self-conscious product.
David James
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- July 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198789758
- eISBN:
- 9780191831447
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198789758.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, Criticism/Theory
This opening chapter traces a modernist genealogy for the poetics of consolation in contemporary writing. It considers the way Virginia Woolf probed in self-contesting fashion the consolations of ...
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This opening chapter traces a modernist genealogy for the poetics of consolation in contemporary writing. It considers the way Virginia Woolf probed in self-contesting fashion the consolations of experimental form. The legacy of her arguments with the redemptive efficacy of aesthetic form in To the Lighthouse (1927) becomes evident even in contemporary novels that maintain a combative stance towards modernism itself. Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) is one such text: a genre-medley of wartime romance and high-modernist pastiche that dissects the ethical ramifications of solace as a contentious aspect of artistic reparation, especially when that reparative impulse also turns out to be a morally compromised stimulus for artistic creativity.Less
This opening chapter traces a modernist genealogy for the poetics of consolation in contemporary writing. It considers the way Virginia Woolf probed in self-contesting fashion the consolations of experimental form. The legacy of her arguments with the redemptive efficacy of aesthetic form in To the Lighthouse (1927) becomes evident even in contemporary novels that maintain a combative stance towards modernism itself. Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) is one such text: a genre-medley of wartime romance and high-modernist pastiche that dissects the ethical ramifications of solace as a contentious aspect of artistic reparation, especially when that reparative impulse also turns out to be a morally compromised stimulus for artistic creativity.
Dominic Head
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719066566
- eISBN:
- 9781781701027
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719066566.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This concluding chapter discusses the relation of Ian McEwan's works in relation to the so-called ‘third culture’. It suggests that McEwan's contribution to the ‘third culture’ reveals structural ...
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This concluding chapter discusses the relation of Ian McEwan's works in relation to the so-called ‘third culture’. It suggests that McEwan's contribution to the ‘third culture’ reveals structural affinities with the double consciousness of modernism and also embodies an intensification of modernist self-consciousness. This chapter suggests that McEwan's unsettling art upsets the equilibrium of knowledge and experience that modernism held out as a fleeting possibility.Less
This concluding chapter discusses the relation of Ian McEwan's works in relation to the so-called ‘third culture’. It suggests that McEwan's contribution to the ‘third culture’ reveals structural affinities with the double consciousness of modernism and also embodies an intensification of modernist self-consciousness. This chapter suggests that McEwan's unsettling art upsets the equilibrium of knowledge and experience that modernism held out as a fleeting possibility.
Clare Hanson
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- June 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198813286
- eISBN:
- 9780191851278
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198813286.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Chapter 3 considers Ian McEwan’s engagement with neo-Darwinism in its manifestation as evolutionary psychology. From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, human behaviour is driven by genetic ...
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Chapter 3 considers Ian McEwan’s engagement with neo-Darwinism in its manifestation as evolutionary psychology. From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, human behaviour is driven by genetic self-interest and society is structured around competition, while our tendency to self-deception disguises our motives from ourselves and others. This bleak view of human nature, which was promoted in the 1990s by influential figures such as Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker, informs the characterization and plot of McEwan’s major novels (Enduring Love, Atonement, and Saturday). It also inflects the movement known as literary Darwinism, with which McEwan was closely associated. Having charted McEwan’s tight connections with neo-Darwinism, the chapter concludes with a reading of his recent novel Nutshell (2016) as a witty subversion of the neo-Darwinian orthodoxies which shaped his earlier workLess
Chapter 3 considers Ian McEwan’s engagement with neo-Darwinism in its manifestation as evolutionary psychology. From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, human behaviour is driven by genetic self-interest and society is structured around competition, while our tendency to self-deception disguises our motives from ourselves and others. This bleak view of human nature, which was promoted in the 1990s by influential figures such as Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker, informs the characterization and plot of McEwan’s major novels (Enduring Love, Atonement, and Saturday). It also inflects the movement known as literary Darwinism, with which McEwan was closely associated. Having charted McEwan’s tight connections with neo-Darwinism, the chapter concludes with a reading of his recent novel Nutshell (2016) as a witty subversion of the neo-Darwinian orthodoxies which shaped his earlier work
Dominic Head
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719066566
- eISBN:
- 9781781701027
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719066566.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter examines Ian McEwan's novels The Innocent and Black Dogs which represent a significant phase of political writing. In both works, the private-public nexus is extended in different ways ...
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This chapter examines Ian McEwan's novels The Innocent and Black Dogs which represent a significant phase of political writing. In both works, the private-public nexus is extended in different ways and they both engage with international politics, and particularly with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. The binary oppositions that order the works at the levels of argument, or ideas, are systematically and purposively unravelled.Less
This chapter examines Ian McEwan's novels The Innocent and Black Dogs which represent a significant phase of political writing. In both works, the private-public nexus is extended in different ways and they both engage with international politics, and particularly with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. The binary oppositions that order the works at the levels of argument, or ideas, are systematically and purposively unravelled.
Paul Giles
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- March 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780198857723
- eISBN:
- 9780191890352
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198857723.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter considers the new relations of past and present to future that have emerged in the wake of scientific discoveries in genetics and other medical technologies. The first section links ...
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This chapter considers the new relations of past and present to future that have emerged in the wake of scientific discoveries in genetics and other medical technologies. The first section links Australian novelist Gerald Murnane with established English writer Ian McEwan, suggesting how for both writers the representation of memory, cultural as well as personal, has been mediated by developments in science. The second section, ‘The American Systems Novel’, extends this analysis by considering how genetics shape the plot of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex and how 9/11 scrambles understandings of temporal sequence in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It concludes by discussing how the historical context of postmodernist science inflects representations of temporal sequence in the novels of Richard Powers, which address issues of computer technology, ecology, and environmentalism, while also representing the aesthetics of temporality in relation to the abstract language of music.Less
This chapter considers the new relations of past and present to future that have emerged in the wake of scientific discoveries in genetics and other medical technologies. The first section links Australian novelist Gerald Murnane with established English writer Ian McEwan, suggesting how for both writers the representation of memory, cultural as well as personal, has been mediated by developments in science. The second section, ‘The American Systems Novel’, extends this analysis by considering how genetics shape the plot of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex and how 9/11 scrambles understandings of temporal sequence in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. It concludes by discussing how the historical context of postmodernist science inflects representations of temporal sequence in the novels of Richard Powers, which address issues of computer technology, ecology, and environmentalism, while also representing the aesthetics of temporality in relation to the abstract language of music.
