Ian Mcewan - Subversive Readings, Informed Misreadings

This book offers a discussion of seven "canonical" novels by Ian McEwan (The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The Child in Time, The Innocent, Black Dogs, Atonement, On Chesil Beach), examining the multiple frames of their structure and meanings.

List of contents

Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The author
The text: informed misreadings
The context
Critical approaches
Exemplifying the method: the early short stories
Exhibit 1: "Homemade" - reading silence, reading against irony
Exhibit 2: "Solid Geometry" - a story of deconstruction
Exhibit 3: "Butterflies" - a story of the reader's entrapment
Exhibit 4: "Reflections of a Kept Ape" - metafiction par excellence
I. Inverting Reality in Fiction: The Cement Garden
A dream within a dream
Liminal nightmares
Voices, visions, delusions
II. Inverting Metafiction: The Comfort of Strangers
The oneiric city
Intimate strangers, monstrous doubles
The villains
The victims
The carnivorous city
Inverted metafiction
III. Inverting Time: The Child in Time
Dystopia now
The voice and the eye
The time machine
The clock and The Bell
The forking paths: the conception scene
Frames: the abduction scene
The child in language
The double: Charles Darke's case
Enchanted time: the other girl
IV. Inverting Story: The Innocent
The unwritten novel: first ideas
Narration: the phantom frame
Levels of clearance
The city of spies
Innocence
V. Inverting History: Black Dogs
The words of a dead (wo)man are modified in the guts of the living
The shadow line
"I cannot quite remember"
Postmemory and post-witnesses
VI. Inverting the Authors: Atonement
Postmodernism with a moral
Drafts and versions
The puzzle of the letters, the puzzle of the dates
The hidden "author"
VII. (Mis)Reading against Misreadings: On Chesil Beach
Nostalgic memory
Metamorphoses: music, writing and shared memory - "Theft"
Arrested development
The (m)Elodie of memory
Concluding Thoughts
Enduring Love: writing letters to oneself
Amsterdam: "he alone would make the speech"
Saturday: metafiction as (un)seeing through another's eyes
Solar: unwriting the hero
Sweet Tooth: metafiction as a spy game
The Children Act: unnatural narration
Nutshell: unnatural narrator in a metafictional Hamlet
Machines like Me: sleeping with the enemy
Lessons: auto-bi(bli)ography
References
Index

About the author

Irena Ksi¿¿opolska is Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw.

Product details

• Authors: Irena Ksiezopolska, Irena Księżopolska
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 29.09.2025
• EAN: 9781032649467
• ISBN: 978-1-0-3264946-7
• No. of pages: 274
• Series: 21st Century Perspectives on British Literature and Society
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; LITERARY CRITICISM / Books & Reading, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 21st Century, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, United Kingdom, Great Britain, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000