Family And Relationships In Ian Mcewan S Fiction

Author : Tomasz Dobrogoszcz
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2018-02-23
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781498539883

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Family and Relationships in Ian McEwan's Fiction by Tomasz Dobrogoszcz Pdf

The book provides a lucid analysis of all Ian McEwan fiction published to date, from his 1975 debut short stories up to the 2016 novel Nutshell, spanning forty years of his literary career. Apart from a general discussion of McEwan’s works, the study offers a uniform focal point: it concentrates on one of the key issues taken up by the writer – the aspect of relationships between partners and between family members. As the book demonstrates, the novelist employs interpersonal relations to establish a pertinent context in which he can dramatically portray the process of identity formation in his characters. Throughout his fiction, McEwan consistently uses references to psychoanalysis, either veiled or direct. The proposed book investigates the novelist’s oeuvre through the lens of the psychoanalytic theory developed by Jacques Lacan. The approach used makes the book useful both for readers well familiar with this apparatus, and for those who need introduction to Lacanian psychoanalysis and such of his concepts as “desire,” “fantasy,” “the symbolic order” or “ the Name-of-the-Father.”

Author : Ian McEwan
Publisher : Vintage Canada
Page : 173 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2014-05-13
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780345809681

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The Child in Time by Ian McEwan Pdf

Stephen Lewis, a successful writer of children's books, is confronted with the unthinkable: his only child, three-year-old Kate, is snatched from him in a supermarket. In one horrifying moment that replays itself over the years that follow, Stephen realizes his daughter is gone. With extraordinary tenderness and insight, Booker Prize-winning author Ian McEwan takes us into the dark territory of a marriage devastated by the loss of a child. Kate's absence sets Stephen and his wife, Julie, on diverging paths as they each struggle with a grief that only seems to intensify with the passage of time. Eloquent and passionate, the novel concludes in a triumphant scene of love and hope that gives full rein to the author's remarkable gifts.

Author : Ian McEwan
Publisher : CCV Digital
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2010-03-11
Category : England
ISBN : 1409089916

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First Love, Last Rites by Ian McEwan Pdf

Author : Ian McEwan
Publisher : Knopf Canada
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2019-04-23
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780735278202

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Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan Pdf

The new novel from the master storyteller is his best in years. Brilliantly McEwan, richly entertaining, a moving love story and a mystery--yet for all its gripping plotline one of the most morally layered novels written for our times, as it carries us into a provocatively real alternative history and the profound challenges of Artificial Intelligence. Set in 1980s London, the story revolves around Charlie: young and reckless, and in love with his upstairs neighbour, the enchanting Miranda whose hidden, murky past hangs between them. He has spent his inheritance on the acquisition of one of twenty-five highly developed new robotic humans--named Adam or Eve, each one beautiful, strong and clever--developed by Alan Turing after his success on the legendary WW2 Enigma codebreaking machine. As London is consumed by the huge protests over England and Argentina's Falklands War and Margaret Thatcher's jingoistic ambitions, Charlie courts Miranda, and his Adam finds himself, inevitably, central to their affair. Great novelist that he is, McEwan pulls us into the question of what it means to love, what makes us human in our fast-changing times, what might follow if a machine understands too well the human heart, and how precarious a construct is the world we live in and think we know.

Author : Ian McEwan
Publisher : Knopf Canada
Page : 485 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2022-09-13
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781039004696

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Lessons by Ian McEwan Pdf

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY VOGUE • THE NEW YORKER • THE GUARDIAN • VOX • THE WASHINGTON POST • BOOKPAGE Both epic and intimate, the story of one man's life across generations and historical upheavals. From the Suez Crisis to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall to the current pandemic—from #1 bestselling author Ian McEwan. When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines’s life is turned upside down. 2,000 miles from his mother’s protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade. Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life. From the Suez Crisis to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall to the current pandemic and climate change, Roland sometimes rides with the tide of history, but more often struggles against it. Haunted by lost opportunities, he seeks solace through every possible means—music, literature, friends, sex, politics and, finally, love cut tragically short, then love ultimately redeemed. His journey raises important questions for us all. Can we take full charge of the course of our lives without damage to others? How do global events beyond our control shape our lives and our memories? And what can we really learn from the traumas of the past? Epic, mesmerising and deeply humane, Lessons is a chronicle for our times—a powerful meditation on history and humanity through the prism of one man’s lifetime.

Author : Ian McEwan
Publisher : Vintage Canada
Page : 178 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2009-02-24
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780307371218

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On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan Pdf

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE The #1 bestselling author of Saturday and Atonement brilliantly illuminates the collision of sexual longing, deep-seated fears and romantic fantasy in his unforgettable, emotionally engaging novel. The year is 1962. Florence, the daughter of a successful businessman and an aloof Oxford academic, is a talented violinist. She dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, the earnest young history student she met by chance and who unexpectedly wooed her and won her heart. Edward grew up in the country on the outskirts of Oxford where his father, the headmaster of the local school, struggled to keep the household together and his mother, brain-damaged from an accident, drifted in a world of her own. Edward’s native intelligence, coupled with a longing to experience the excitement and intellectual fervour of the city, had taken him to University College in London. Falling in love with the accomplished, shy and sensitive Florence—and having his affections returned with equal intensity—has utterly changed his life. Their marriage, they believe, will bring them happiness, the confidence and the freedom to fulfill their true destinies. The glowing promise of the future, however, cannot totally mask their worries about the wedding night. Edward, who has had little experience with women, frets about his sexual prowess. Florence’s anxieties run deeper: she is overcome by conflicting emotions and a fear of the moment she will surrender herself. From the precise and intimate depiction of two young lovers eager to rise above the hurts and confusion of the past, to the touching story of how their unexpressed misunderstandings and fears shape the rest of their lives, On Chesil Beach is an extraordinary novel that brilliantly, movingly shows us how the entire course of a life can be changed—by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.

Author : Ian McEwan
Publisher : Anchor
Page : 174 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2016-09-13
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780385542081

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Nutshell by Ian McEwan Pdf

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “suspenseful, dazzlingly clever and gravely profound” (The Washington Post) novel that brilliantly recasts Shakespeare and lends new weight to the age-old question of Hamlet's hesitation, from the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement. Trudy has been unfaithful to her husband, John. What’s more, she has kicked him out of their marital home, a valuable old London town house, and in his place is his own brother, the profoundly banal Claude. The illicit couple have hatched a scheme to rid themselves of her inconvenient husband forever. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month-old resident of Trudy’s womb. As Trudy’s unborn son listens, bound within her body, to his mother and his uncle’s murderous plans, he gives us a truly new perspective on our world, seen from the confines of his. Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons, coming in September!

Author : Ian McEwan
Publisher : Vintage Canada
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2010-07-20
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780307366993

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Enduring Love by Ian McEwan Pdf

In one of the most striking opening scenes ever written, a bizarre ballooning accident and a chance meeting give birth to an obsession so powerful that an ordinary man is driven to the brink of madness and murder by another's delusions. Ian McEwan brings us an unforgettable story—dark, gripping, and brilliantly crafted—of how life can change in an instant.

Author : Ian McEwan
Publisher : RosettaBooks
Page : 154 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2011-02-08
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780795302596

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The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan Pdf

Orphaned siblings create a macabre secret world for themselves in this “irresistibly readable” novel by the New York Times-bestselling author (The New York Review of Books). This “powerful and disconcerting” novel by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Children Act and Atonement (The Daily Telegraph) tells the story of a dying family who live in a dying part of the city. A father of four children decides, in an effort to make his garden easier to control, to pave it over. In the process, he has a heart attack and dies, leaving the cement garden unfinished and the children to the care of their mother. Soon after, the mother too dies and the children, fearful of being separated by social services, decide to cover up their parents’ deaths: they bury their mother in the cement garden. The story is told from the point of view of Jack, one of the sons, who is entering adolescence with all of its attendant curiosity and appetites. Julie, the eldest, is almost a grown woman. Sue is rather bookish and observes all that goes on around her. And Tom is the youngest and the baby of the lot. The children seem to manage in this perverse setting rather well—until Julie brings home a boyfriend who threatens their secret by asking too many questions. “[A] beautiful but disturbing novel.”—The AV Club “McEwan’s evocative detail and perfect British prose lend a genteel decorum to the death and decay that surround the family.”—The New Yorker

Author : Ian McEwan
Publisher : Vintage Canada
Page : 290 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2009-02-24
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780307371225

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Saturday by Ian McEwan Pdf

"Dazzling. . . . Profound and urgent" —Observer "A book of great maturity, beautifully alive to the fragility of happiness and all forms of violence. . . . Everyone should read Saturday" —Financial Times Saturday, February 15, 2003. Henry Perowne, a successful neurosurgeon, stands at his bedroom window before dawn and watches a plane—ablaze with fire like a meteor—arcing across the London sky. Over the course of the following day, unease gathers about Perowne, as he moves among hundreds of thousands of anti-war protestors who’ve taken to the streets in the aftermath of 9/11. A minor car accident brings him into confrontation with Baxter, a fidgety, aggressive man, who to Perowne’s professional eye appears to be profoundly unwell. But it is not until Baxter makes a sudden appearance at the Perowne family home that Henry’s earlier fears seem about to be realized. . .

Author : David Malcolm
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1570034362

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Understanding Ian McEwan by David Malcolm Pdf

Critically-acclaimed contemporary British writer Ian McEwan's novels and short stories often involve tales of aberrance and obsession. In this guide for students and the interested general reader, Malcolm (English, U. of Gdansk, Poland) discusses themes such as incest, espionage, sexual fixation, and political dysfunction in McEwan's writing. He also analyzes McEwan's portrayal of women; his concern with rationalism; his moral perspective; and the impact of feminism on his fiction. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author : Jim Booth
Publisher : Watchmaker Publishing
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0972178600

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The New Southern Gentleman by Jim Booth Pdf

"Daniel Randolph Deal is a Southern aristocrat, having the required bloodline, but little of the nobility. A man resistant to the folly of ethics, he prefers a selective, self-indulgent morality. He is a confessed hedonist, albeit responsibly so."--Back cover

Author : Irena Księżopolska
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 285 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2024-04-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781040021897

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Ian McEwan by Irena Księżopolska Pdf

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), introducing radical new readings, which are offered not as ultimate and conclusive “solutions” of the textual puzzles, but as possibilities to engage with the text creatively, to enrich the critical consensus and restore interpretative freedom to the readers. This project formulates a strategy of “inclusive reading” – an approach to the text that does not seek to reduce it to a single interpretation, and yet is comprehensively informed through the analysis of the primary text, critical discussion, authorial comments and the context of the composition. Each reading demonstrates the metafictional structure of the texts, indicating that McEwan’s works may be treated as invitations to roam within their worlds, examining the multiple frames of their structure and the meanings generated thereby. All the chapters attend to submerged, repressed, or deliberately masked voices. The Cement Garden is seen as a multi-layered dream, with a shifting hierarchy of dreamers; The Comfort of Strangers is viewed as an inverted metafiction, with insubstantial characters corrupting more complex heroes; The Child in Time is read as Stephen’s book written for his dead daughter; The Innocent as a memory narrative of Leonard who refuses to notice Maria’s role as a spy. In Black Dogs the over-exposure of unreliability is studied as a screen for personal trauma; in the analysis of Atonement Briony’s claim to authorship is questioned and Cecilia is suggested as an alternative narrative agent. Finally, examining On Chesil Beach, both characters’ voices are reconstructed in search of the superior narrative power, which in the end is seen to be elusive, as the text seeks to undermine the hierarchy of voices.

Author : Urszula Kizelbach
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 239 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2023-02-22
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9783031186905

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(Im)politeness in McEwan’s Fiction by Urszula Kizelbach Pdf

This book is a pragma-stylistic study of Ian McEwan’s fiction, providing a qualitative analysis of his selected novels using (im)politeness theory. (Im)politeness is investigated on two levels of analysis: the level of the plot and the story world (intradiegetic level) and the level of the communication between the implied author and implied reader in fiction (extradiegetic level). The pragmatic theory of (im)politeness serves the aim of internal characterisation and helps readers to better understand and explain the characters’ motivations and actions, based on the stylistic analysis of their speech and thoughts and point of view. More importantly, the book introduces the notion of “the impoliteness of the literary fiction” – a state of affairs where the implied author (or narrator) expresses their impolite beliefs to the reader through the text, which has face-threatening consequences for the audience, e.g. moral shock or disgust, dissociation from the protagonist, feeling hurt or ‘put out’. Extradiegetic impoliteness, one of the key characteristics of McEwan’s fiction, offers an alternative to the literary concept of “a secret communion of the author and reader” (Booth 1961), describing an ideal connection, or good rapport, between these two participants of fictional communication. This book aims to unite literary scholars and linguists in the debate on the benefits of combining pragmatics and stylistics in literary analysis, and it will be of interest to a wide audience in both fields.

Author : Ismail Durgut
Publisher : GRIN Verlag
Page : 12 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2009-08-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783640403219

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Sister, Mother And Lover: The family roles of Julie in Ian McEwan’s "The Cement Garden" by Ismail Durgut Pdf

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 2.0, University of Duisburg-Essen, language: English, abstract: In [Ian McEwan’s] The Cement Garden a prominent interpretative signpost is bestowed by the literary allusion to the story tradition in which children are put into a situation in which they must fend for themselves. The key reference here is to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a pessimistic tale of savage that emerges within the child when free of social controls. However, the children in McEwan’s novel are not entirely cut from society. They try to keep their sense of family together by entombing their dead mother in concrete in the cellar of their isolated house. Moreover, all of them are influenced by adult codes of familial behavior. These codes become distorted in their independent existence, a process that culminates in the incestuous involvement of the eldest siblings. While Sue, the younger sister of the first-person narrator Jack, does not change visibly, Jack himself runs through a metamorphosis in terms of hygiene and outward appearance as such. Tom, the youngest, starts dressing up as a girl and later on behaves like a toddler and Julie, the eldest, takes over the responsibility for the others and turns from sister to mother. At the end of the story, she even becomes Jack’s lover. The following paper will discuss the different family roles of Julie. First, there will be a chapter on how Jack views his elder sister. This shall function as an overview of Julie’s character. The main part of this paper will present Julie’s changing family roles from sister to mother and finally to lover. The oedipal theme linked to that, will not be made a subject of discussion in this paper. A conclusion will follow the summary in the final chapter.