Book Practices & Textual Itineraries - 13

Ian McEwan is recognised as one of the most important British writers today. This collection of essays offers an updated insight into his mature fiction. Over his four-decade-long literary career, he has been awarded numerous prestigious prizes, including the Man Booker Prize in 1998. His work is marked by diversity and encompasses different genres, time periods, themes and narrative voices. This collection presents new critical approaches on aspects of McEwan's oeuvre such as questions of ethics and the representation of the past. The contributors to this volume focus on McEwan's mature work, away from the 'shocklit’ which was initially his trademark and which earned him the nickname of 'Ian Macabre’. They discuss more recent novels, starting from the 1990s, up to The Cockroach, published in 2019, which display the author’s growing engagement with topical issues. Essays by international scholars span diachronic approaches, case studies and film adaptations.