Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-59).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-59). Also available in print.

Thesis (M.A.)--Bowling Green State University, 2006. / Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 98 p. Includes bibliographical references.

The aim of this bachelor’s thesis is to discuss, and attempt to confirm, that Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) lacks closure. Since the novel has an unreliable narrator who offers her readers several credible endings to her narrative, and who also acts as the fictitious author of the story, unreliability and metafiction are claimed to be the main underlying causes of this deprivation of closure. The discussion in the first section of the analysis is based on the plot development depicted in Gustav Freytag’s Pyramid, and the second part is focused on Victoria Orlowski’s four metafictional characteristics denoting ways in which writers of metafiction transgress narrative levels. The claim is concluded to be partly fulfilled, since Atonement is regarded as lacking closure in terms of narrative structure but not in a philosophical and moral sense.

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Thesis advisor: Marjorie Howes / Thesis advisor: Andrew Von Hendy / Literary Evasions of the English Nation in the 20th Century Nicholas Parker - Prof. Marjorie Howes and Prof. Andrew Von Hendy. ABSTRACT This dissertation seeks to engage with some of the complex means by which English subjects in the twentieth century envisage their relationship with the concept of nation, and with their own nation in particular. These are deeply ambivalent relationships, which present simultaneously seemingly contradictory and irreconcilable characteristics. In some ways the nation seems hegemonic and repressively conditioning to many English writers over the last hundred years. It is also deeply embedded in our ways of conceiving of ourselves, and is an irresistibly enticing means of understanding the world around us. It pushes individuals towards resistance and yet strongly resists evasion. At times the nation enables the establishment of identity in opposition to other ideological forces; at other moments, it becomes the problematic ideological structure in itself. These and other dichotomies will be examined in the course of this study. In chapter one I consider examples of writing between the wars, and comparable ways in which two authors render the subjectivity of the English individual as an untenable balancing act between living inside and outside the nation's literal and metaphorical territory. Woolf and the little known C.E. Montague narrate their changing engagement with England during and between the World Wars. Wartime is a moment of profound reification of the nation, where failure to fully commit to support it is potentially punishable by death. Both Mrs. Dalloway and Montague's Rough Justice narrate, in their differing ways, just such a death. Both authors share a developing sense of the frailty and decrepitude of England in the period, but both also develop a clear model for the recasting, rather than the casting out, of England into more enduring and politically palatable terms. In the second chapter I turn to the nation as it attempts to reproduce itself abroad. In the 1930s colonial English abroad are rendered in a state of dislocation from their home nation by Orwell and Mary O'Malley. They are cast as "ambassadors" for the English nation, proxies who are expected to prove themselves the most respectable of exemplars for their home. However, in the course of Burmese Days and O'Malley's Peking Picnic these central characters prove unqualified to maintain the impossible ideals of the nation they are expected to represent. They are instead aliens, in relation to both their home nation and their new "home" abroad. Chapter three ranges from the 1930s to 1960s, and to English regional narratives in which characters actively attempt to evade their nationality. The conceptual center of the chapter is the Angry Young Men movement of the 1950s, quintessentially represented by Alan Sillitoe and Keith Waterhouse. Beyond manifesting a rebelliousness towards the English nation in general, these two writers outline characters who employ a technique of fantasizing other lives as an attempt to liberate themselves from the pressures of an English nation with which they cannot, or will not, align themselves. They daydream visions of empowerment, glory and power. In so doing they momentarily disrupt the direct influence of the nation over them. Phyllis Bentley, a Northern English writer from an earlier decade, renders in her novel Environment a comparable desire to break from the influence of the English nation by dint of daydreaming another, independent existence. The relatively obscure Arthur Wise, writing in the late 1960s, enacts this fantasy in the most extreme terms in his 1968 novel The Day the Queen Flew to Scotland for the Grouse Shooting, a text that depicts the dream of bloody revolution and complete fragmentation of England, North and South. In my final chapter I turn to writing from later in the century, in which ambivalence about national affiliation leads to an extreme skepticism towards the nation as a concept in general, and to all other ideological constructs along with it. William Golding and Ian McEwan, in their novels Free Fall and Black Dogs, create willfully nihilistic characters that fear all hegemonic forces and struggle to gain and retain independence from investment in nation. Neither of these central protagonists can remain dislocated from allegiances for long however - the need for alignment with some form of collective construct outside themselves (like nation, personal love, theological values, etcetera) is overwhelming. I conclude, on the basis of the work of these ten writers, that the English nation is in a deeply unstable position, its authority, and even its substantive existence, challenged in a variety of ways both from without and from within. Its external opponents, both in rival nation-states and sub-national ideological movements (a number of which are violently threatening) are largely manifest. Perhaps more dangerous still, for England's continued endurance, are the threats which these writers suggest can come from national `insiders,' who resist, evade, question, even attack, the nation from which they purportedly emerge. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on November 5, 2007) Includes bibliographical references.

My diploma thesis Space in Contemporary British Fiction will focus on the concept of space in contemporary British novel; at first, three of leading English authors will be mentioned (Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, Martin Amis), and it will briefly characterize the literary period in which their novels were published. In the chosen novels, the thesis will notice the changes of McEwan´s work towards the globalization of space. The core of interpretational analyses will be the novels The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, Amsterdam, Saturday, Solar and Sweet Tooth. The comparison with Golding´s Lord of the Flies will be a part of the chapter concerning McEwan´s first novel, The Cement Garden.

The diploma thesis "From Child In Time to Atonement: The importance of crisis in Ian McEwan's works" aims to identify and subsequently analyse the issue of crisis in the selected works of Ian McEwan. The thesis focuses on six novels: The Child In Time, The Innocent, Black Dogs, Enduring Love, Amsterdam and Atonement. In the theoretical part, Ian McEwan is introduced in the context of British literature. Since Ian McEwan's work is on occasion influenced by postmodern thinking, the concept of postmodernism is characterized in brief. As Ian McEwan's later fiction is influenced immensely by his literary beginnings, his early fiction is introduced in order to provide a holistic view, a more complete picture. The following practical part examines the concept of crisis in Ian McEwan's work, using the author's selected works as references.

This Thesis is an experiment. Within its pages a number of stories will be told, the foci of which will apply a particular methodology—what I call ‘Ethnographic Criticism’—to the examination of a specific concept: modern Atheist identity. First, it will introduce Ethnographic Criticism as a new and significant style of literary analysis aimed at reading fictional texts in order to generate anthropological insights about how particular identities are formed. Second, it will use this new means of criticism to discuss and evaluate how Atheist identity might be perceived as being constructed within a dialectic between seemingly exclusive forms of Theism and Atheism. Ethnographic Criticism exists at the nexus between fiction and ethnography, and its genesis derives from three foundational pillars: ethnographic construction, Ethical Criticism, and discourse analysis. In the three Chapters of Part One, each of these pillars will be established, both exegetically and critically. This examination will play a key role in explicating how the ‘made-up’ qualities of fiction might be converted into the ‘made-from’ qualities of ethnography. Additionally, these Chapters will reveal the roots of Ethnographic Criticism through an analysis of discourses dealing with the ‘literary turn’ in the theory of anthropology, how Ethical Criticism associates fictional character development with identity construction, and the anthropological benefits of discourse analysis. As a case study, I will apply Ethnographic Criticism to an analysis of Atheist identity construction. Due to the combination of a relative absence of existing ethnographic sources on the subject, an ambiguous academic discourse on the definition of the term, and a paucity of cultural units or ‘tribes’ of Atheists in which to observe, my use of Ethnographic Criticism will attempt to fill a methodological lacuna concerning the study of Atheist identity. Thus, in Part Two, I will focus on two fictional texts by the contemporary English novelist Ian McEwan: Black Dogs (1992) and Enduring Love (1997). In this analysis, not only will McEwan’s fictional characters be treated as if they are ‘real,’ historical individuals, they will be evaluated through an anthropological lens in order to isolate within their interactional validations a means to understand how Atheists define themselves via dialectical communication. In this way, and in both explicating and reflecting upon this approach, my experimental analysis will identify a number of dynamic, yet no less precarious, outcomes that might surface from reading fictional texts as if they were authoritatively equal to ethnographic ones.