Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
8,194
result(s) for
"Mcewan, Ian"
Sort by:
The Cambridge companion to Ian McEwan
This Companion showcases the best scholarship on Ian McEwan's work, and offers a comprehensive demonstration of his importance in the canon of international contemporary fiction. The whole career is covered, and the connections as well as the developments across the oeuvre are considered. The essays offer both an assessment of McEwan's technical accomplishments and a sense of the contextual factors that have provided him with inspiration. This volume has been structured to highlight the points of intersection between literary questions and evaluations, and the treatment of contemporary socio-cultural issues and topics. For the more complex novels - such as Atonement - this book offers complementary perspectives. In this respect, The Cambridge Companion to Ian McEwan serves as a prism of interpretation, revealing the various interpretive emphases each of McEwan's more complex works invite, and to show how his various recurring preoccupations run through his career.
BOOK
Literary Phenomenology and the Historicity of the Lifeworld: Personal and Public Crisis in Edmund Husserl and Ian McEwan
This essay argues for the relevance of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological method as applied to Ian McEwan’s presentation of private crisis and public history in his novel Lessons . Both Husserl and McEwan advocate for the judicious use of reason and rational inquiry in the direction of politics and culture. I demonstrate how McEwan’s literary representation of consciousness in the context of a life lived amid historical change draws near to a practice of phenomenology, while also probing some difficulties in achieving the neutrality of the transcendental standpoint because of McEwan’s complex evocation of memory, repressed desire, and the uncertain image of the past.
Journal Article
The Secularizing Work of the Novel
Studies of Ian McEwan’s novels have demonstrated his engagements with modernist form and neuroscience, but they have not attended to how he draws these two together with a specific purpose: to put the novel to work for secularizing ends, understood as challenging and surpassing religion and the supernatural as sources of meaning. What draws McEwan to Virginia Woolf and James Joyce is not simply modernist form per se, but its secularizing potential, though one McEwan sees as incompletely realized. McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) completes the secularizing work of modernist form by grounding it in materialist, brain-based cognition, a reading of the novel supported by a genetic view of McEwan’s notebooks and drafts. Saturday, and McEwan’s fiction generally, emerge as much more stridently secular than recent studies of his work’s sincerity and commitment suggest. Identifying this set of affiliations across the modern and contemporary novel further develops the form’s secular genealogy.
Journal Article
Moral Stupidity in Ian McEwan’s Atonement
This paper argues that the major catalyst behind Briony Tallis’ rape accusation in Atonement is due to the ethical issue of moral stupidity. The paper examines why Briony Tallis, the protagonist of Atonement, accuses Robbie Hunter for the rape of her sixteen- year-old cousin, Lola. For much of the scholarship on Atonement, debates on the moral implications of Briony’s accusation have dominated, but none of these studies have examined why Briony indicts Robbie for Lola’s rape, destroying the lives of both Robbie and Cecelia. Therefore, this paper offers a nuanced explanation of Briony’s allegation and actions afterwards. Consequently, Briony is consistently described as stupid both as a child and as an adult and the word 'stupid' is repeated fourteen times in the text, while 'stupidity,' repeated five times. Briony’s behavior early in the text is represented as a serious ethical shortcoming that impedes her own moral compass which is also based on class prejudice, jealousy, and irresponsibility. McEwan embeds Briony’s moral shortcoming in a general atmosphere within the novel of youthful foolishness and naïveté. Unfortunately, it is because of the lack of moral direction that the rape takes place and Briony, out of her blinded ego, indicts an innocent young man.
Journal Article
Lack of Empathy in Varieties of Love in Enduring Love
Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love foregrounds the protagonists’ failed construction of romantic love and illustrates the fragility of Joe and Clarissa’s love on the one hand and the destructive forces of Jed’s homosexual love for Joe on the other hand. In the light of Patrick Hogan’s componential statement on romantic love, this paper seeks to clarify how the sexual desire system, reward system, and attachment system participate in the collapse of Joe and Clarissa’s love as well as to make out why the love of Jed to Joe can be overwhelming and out-of-control. Through a nuanced analysis of ordinary love and its distorted opposite presented in Enduring Love, it can be discovered that love is a complicated construction on both sides and the destruction of love can be boiled down to the lack of empathy, in this way McEwan makes prominent the imperative of practicing empathetic understanding with each other when confronted with unidentifiable risks.
Journal Article
Literature and Professional Society: Modernism, Aesthetics, and Ian McEwan’s Saturday
Ian McEwan’s novels are well-known for their ongoing conversation with turn-of-the-twentieth-century modernism. This essay argues that McEwan’s novel Saturday engages with two modernist problematics—modernist interrogation of aesthetics and the emergence of the professional classes during the modernist era. Reading McEwan’s novel through and against its modernist antecedents, Mrs. Dalloway and Howards End , provides a means of understanding how, in modernist novels, a discourse of literary and aesthetic value exists as a function of the tension between leisure-class and professional-class ideologies. The triangulation of modernism, Saturday , and discourses of professionalism in the essay provides a theoretical framework for historicizing the perennial conflicts between theoretically informed literary criticism and “new aestheticism,” “new formalism,” and most recently, “postcritique” within the context of professional class hegemony.
Journal Article
The New Atheist Novel
The New Atheist Novel is the first study of a major new genre of contemporary fiction.It examines how Richard Dawkins's so-called 'New Atheism' movement has caught the imagination of four eminent modern novelists: Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Philip Pullman.
eBook
Atoning for Nostalgia in Ian McEwan’s Atonement
Many critics have pointed out the ambiguities of Atonement, a postmodernist anti-nostalgic novel that brings to the fore all the traditional topoi of Englishness in order better to denounce them as sham. In Atonement, the nostalgic longing is linked to the desire of Briony (the protagonist/narrator) for a return to a state of innocence which, I will argue through a close analysis of the text and its recurring images, is as much an atoning for her crime as a longing to be at-one in a state of harmony. Literally utopian, this nostalgic longing appears as a fantasy of omnipotence by an immature ego. Yet Briony’s being born into a writer entails a facing of the other within the self, an atoning for her nostalgic bias, not by erasing it, but by acknowledging her full responsibility in it, a process the reader is also invited to go through. From a regressive quest, nostalgia thus turns into an opening to otherness and to new potentialities. The unbridgeable gap between nostalgic desire and its fulfilment is what fuels our longing, keeps us alive and allows for creation.
Journal Article
Ian McEwan Celebrates Shakespeare
Abstract The aim of this article is to analyse Ian McEwan's Nutshell, published in September 2016, as a modern rewriting of Hamlet in relation to the usual issues and themes previously tackled by the author throughout his narrative. The novel focuses on the love triangle involving Claude [Claudius], Trudy [Gertrude] and John Cairncross [King Hamlet] and narrates how the lovers plot the murder of the husband from the unusual perspective of a proto-Hamlet in the womb. Despite the fact that he is rewriting a Shakespearean work, the author remains faithful to his style and favourite topics, displaying the function of the family as destructive rather than constructive, conditioning the later development of the children and rendering them devoid of the affection needed. Similarly, Nutshell also depicts his recurrent configuration of mothers as authoritative and destructive, especially for the natural growth of their offspring.
Journal Article