The Cambridge Companion to Ian McEwan Cambridge Companions to Literature Series

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.

Chronology; Introduction Dominic Head; 1. 'Shock lit': the early fiction Eluned Summers-Bremner; 2. Moral dilemmas Lynn Wells; 3. Science and climate crisis Astrid Bracke; 4. The novel of ideas Michael Lemahieu; 5. Cold War fictions Richard Brown; 6. The construction of childhood Peter Childs; 7. The public and the private David Malcolm; 8. Masculinities Ben Knights; 9. The novellas Dominic Head; 10. Realist legacies Judith Seaboyer; 11. Limited modernism Thom Dancer; 12. Narrative artifice David James; Further reading.

Dominic Head is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Nottingham, where he served as Head of School, 2007–10. His previous books are: The Modernist Short Story (Cambridge, 1992); Nadine Gordimer (Cambridge, 1994); J. M. Coetzee (Cambridge, 1997); The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000 (Cambridge, 2002); Ian McEwan (2007); The State of the Novel (2008); The Cambridge Introduction to J. M. Coetzee (Cambridge, 2009), and Modernity and the English Rural Novel (Cambridge, 2017). Also, as editor: The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, third edition (Cambridge, 2006); and The Cambridge History of the English Short Story (Cambridge, 2016).