Ian McEwan

In this survey Ian McEwan emerges as one of those rare writers whose works have received both popular and critical acclaim. His novels grace the bestseller lists, and he is well regarded by critics, both as a stylist and as a serious thinker about the function and capacities of narrative
fiction.

McEwan's novels treat issues that are central to our times: politics, and the promotion of vested interests; male violence and the problem of gender relations; science and the limits of rationality; nature and ecology; love and innocence; and the quest for an ethical worldview. Yet he is also an
economical stylist: McEwan's readers are called upon to attend, not just to the grand themes, but also to the precision of his spare writing.

Although McEwan's later works are more overtly political, more humane, and more ostentatiously literary than the early work, Dominic Head uncovers the continuity as well as the sense of evolution through the oeuvre. Head makes the case for McEwan's prominence - pre-eminence, even - in the canon of
contemporary British novelists.


Author: Dominic Head
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 04/30/2007
Pages: 232
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.68lbs
Size: 8.55h x 6.39w x 0.72d
ISBN: 9780719066573

About the Author

Dominic Head is Professor of Modern English Literature in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham