Dominic Head 
Ian McEwan 

In this survey Ian Mc Ewan 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.

Mc Ewan’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: Mc Ewan’s readers are called upon to attend, not just to the grand themes, but also to the precision of his spare writing.

Although Mc Ewan’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 Mc Ewan’s prominence – pre-eminence, even – in the canon of contemporary British novelists.

Table of Content

1. Introduction
2. Shock-Lit: The Short Stories and The Cement Garden
3. Dreams of captivity: The Comfort of Strangers
4. Towards the ‘Implicate Order’: The Child in Time
5. Unravelling the binaries: The Innocent and Black Dogs
6. ‘A Mess of Our Own Unmaking’: Enduring Love
7. Amsterdam: Mc Ewan’s ‘Spoiler’
8. ‘The Wild and Inward Journey of Writing’: Atonement
9. ‘Accidents of Character and Circumstance’: Saturday
10. Conclusion: Mc Ewan and the ‘Third Culture’

About the author

Daniel Lea is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Oxford Brookes University