Contemporary Critical Perspectives

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Ian McEwan is one of the most significant, and controversial, British novelists working today. His books are both critically - and academically - acclaimed and embraced by readers across the world. Although primarily a novelist, he has also written short stories, television plays, a libretto, a children's book and a film adaptation. Across these many forms his work retains a distinctive character that explores questions of morality, place and history, nationhood, sexuality and gender.

Now fully updated for its second edition, this guide brings together a collection of new critical perspectives on McEwan's oeuvre, not only covering the early works and his writing for the screen but also incorporating detailed and original analyses of the later work, including new readings of his latest books, Solar and Sweet Tooth . With an updated and extended guide to further critical reading on McEwan, the book also includes an interview with the author himself, a chronology of his life, work and times and the full text of a lost early McEwan short story.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Foreword (p. ix)
• Series Editors' Preface (p. xiii)
• Acknowledgements (p. xiv)
• Contributors (p. xv)
• Chronology of Ian McEwan's Life (p. xviii)
• Introduction: A Cartography of the Contemporary: Mapping Newness in the Work of Ian McEwan (p. 1)
• Chapter 1 Surrealist Encounters in Ian McEwan's Early Work (p. 13)
• Chapter 2 'Profoundly dislocating and infinite in possibility': Ian McEwan's Screenwriting (p. 26)
• Chapter 3 The Innocent as Anti-Oedipal Critique of Cultural Pornography (p. 43)
• Chapter 4 Words of War, War of Words: Atonement and the Question of Plagiarism (p. 57)
• Chapter 5 Postmodernism and the Ethics of Fiction in Atonement (p. 70)
• Chapter 6 Ian McEwan's Modernist Time: Atonement and Saturday (p. 83)
• Chapter 7 Ian McEwan and the Modernist Consciousness of the City in Saturday (p. 99)
• Chapter 8 On Chesil Beach: Another 'Overrated' Novella? (p. 115)
• Chapter 9 Solar: Apocalypse Not (p. 123)
• Into the Archive: 'Untitled': A Minute Story (p. 137)
• Afterword: Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth: 'Put in porphyry and marble do appear' (p. 139)
• Journeys without Maps: An Interview with Ian McEwan (p. 144)
• References (p. 156)
• Further Reading (p. 166)
• Index (p. 177)