Download or read book Contemporary Fiction and Science from Amis to McEwan written by Rachel Holland and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-04-26 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book identifies, in contemporary fiction, a new type of novel at the interface of science and the humanities, working from the premise that a shift has taken place in the relations between the two cultures in the last two or three decades. As popular science comes to assume an ever greater cultural significance, contemporary authors are engaging in new ways with ideas that it disseminates. A new literary phenomenon is emerging, in which the focus on language-based theories of the self and the world that has been predominant in the latter half of the previous century is making way for a renewed commitment to the material facts, both of human existence and the universe beyond subjectivity. The book analyses the work of Martin Amis, William Boyd, David Lodge, Richard Powers, Michel Houellebecq, Jonathan Franzen, Margaret Atwood, and Ian McEwan, revealing the ways in which these ‘third culture novels’ negotiate the relationship between literature and science.
Download or read book Saturday written by Ian McEwan and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2009-02-24 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Dazzling. . . . Profound and urgent" —Observer "A book of great maturity, beautifully alive to the fragility of happiness and all forms of violence. . . . Everyone should read Saturday" —Financial Times Saturday, February 15, 2003. Henry Perowne, a successful neurosurgeon, stands at his bedroom window before dawn and watches a plane—ablaze with fire like a meteor—arcing across the London sky. Over the course of the following day, unease gathers about Perowne, as he moves among hundreds of thousands of anti-war protestors who’ve taken to the streets in the aftermath of 9/11. A minor car accident brings him into confrontation with Baxter, a fidgety, aggressive man, who to Perowne’s professional eye appears to be profoundly unwell. But it is not until Baxter makes a sudden appearance at the Perowne family home that Henry’s earlier fears seem about to be realized. . .
Download or read book Solar written by Ian McEwan and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2010-03-09 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engrossing, satirical and very funny new novel on climate change. Michael Beard is in his late fifties; bald, overweight, unprepossessing—a Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. An inveterate philanderer, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: she is having the affair, and he is still in love with her. When Beard's professional and personal worlds are entwined in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself, a chance for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and very possibly save the world from environmental disaster. With a global scope, Solar is a comedy dealing directly with the crises of today. A story of one man's ambitions and self-deceptions, it is a startling and stylish new departure in the work of one of the world's great writers.
Download or read book On Modern British Fiction written by Zachary Leader and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays on fiction in Britain, with contributions by contemporary novelists and critics such as Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Hilary Mantel, James Wood, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Wood, and Elaine Showalter.
Download or read book Ian McEwan s Atonement written by Julie Ellam and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2009-09-28 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Continuum Contemporaries series gives readers accessible and informative introductions to some of the most popular, most acclaimed and most influential novels of recent years. This guide to Atonement features a biography of the author, a full-length analysis of the novel, a summary of the novel's popular and critical reception, a discussion of the recent film adaptation and a great deal more. If you are studying this novel, reading it for your book club, or if you simply want to know more about it, you'll find this guide informative, intelligent, and helpful.
Download or read book Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction written by James Peacock and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this collection address the current preoccupation with neurological conditions and disorders in contemporary literature by British and American writers. The book places these fictional treatments within a broader cultural and historical context, exploring such topics as the two cultures debate, the neurological turn, postmodernism and the post-postmodern, and responses to September 11th. Considering a variety of materials including mainstream literary fiction, the graphic novel, popular fiction, autobiographical writing, film, and television, contributors consider the contemporary dimensions of the interface between the sciences and humanities, developing the debate about the post-postmodern as a new humanism or a return to realism and investigating questions of form and genre, and of literary continuities and discontinuities. Further, the essays discuss contemporary writers’ attempts to engage the relation between the individual and the social, looking at the relation between the "syndrome syndrome" (referring to the prevalence in contemporary literature of neurological phenomena evident at the biological level) and existing work in the field of trauma studies (where explanations tend to have taken a psychoanalytical form), allowing for perspectives that question some of the assumptions that have marked both these fields. The current literary preoccupation with neurological conditions presents us with a new and distinctive form of trauma literature, one concerned less with psychoanalysis than with the physical and evolutionary status of human beings.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction 1980 2018 written by Peter Boxall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1980 to the present, huge transformations have occurred in every area of British cultural life. The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 ushered in a new neoliberal era in politics and economics that dramatically reshaped the British landscape. Alongside this political shift, we have seen transformations to the public sphere caused by the arrival of the internet and of social media, and changes in the global balance of power brought about by 9/11, the emergence of China and India as superpowers, and latterly the British vote to leave the European Union. British fiction of the period is intimately interwoven with these historical shifts. This collection brings together some of the most penetrating critics of the contemporary, to explore the role that the British novel has had in shaping the cultural landscape of our time, at a moment, in the wake of the EU referendum of 2016, when the question of what it means to be British has become newly urgent.
Download or read book The Survival of the Novel written by Neil McEwan and published by Springer. This book was released on 1981-11-26 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ian McEwan written by Sebastian Groes and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2009-07-19 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An up-to-date reader of critical essays on Ian McEwan by leading international academics, covering McEwan's most recent novels including Saturday, On Chesil Beach and an analysis of the film adaptation of Enduring Love.
Download or read book Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel written by Sandra Dinter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1980s novels about childhood for adults have been a booming genre within the contemporary British literary market. Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel offers the first comprehensive study of this literary trend. Assembling analyses of key works by Ian McEwan, Doris Lessing, P. D. James, Nick Hornby, Sarah Moss and Stephen Kelman and situating them in their cultural and political contexts, Sandra Dinter uncovers both the reasons for the current popularity of such fiction and the theoretical shift that distinguishes it from earlier literary epochs. The book’s central argument is that the contemporary English novel draws on the constructivist paradigm shift that revolutionised the academic study of childhood several decades ago. Contemporary works of fiction, Dinter argues, depart from the notion of childhood as a naturally given phase of life and examine the agents, interests and conflicts involved in its cultural production. Dinter also considers the limits of this new theoretical impetus, observing that authors and scholars alike, even when they claim to conceive of childhood as a construct, do not always give up on the idea of its ‘natural’ core. Accordingly, this book reconstructs how the English novel between the 1980s and the 2010s oscillates between an acknowledgment of constructivism and an endorsement of childhood as the last irrevocable quintessence of humanity. In doing so, it successfully extends the literary and cultural history of childhood to the immediate present.
Download or read book Machines Like Me written by Ian McEwan and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement—”a sharply intelligent novel of ideas” (The New York Times) that asks whether a machine can understand the human heart, or whether we are the ones who lack understanding. Set in an uncanny alternative 1982 London—where Britain has lost the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power, and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence—Machines Like Me powerfully portrays two lovers who will be tested beyond their understanding. Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first generation of synthetic humans. With Miranda's assistance, he codesigns Adam's personality. The near-perfect human that emerges is beautiful, strong, and smart—and a love triangle soon forms. Ian McEwan's subversive, gripping novel poses fundamental questions: What makes us human—our outward deeds or our inner lives? Could a machine understand the human heart? This provocative and thrilling tale warns against the power to invent things beyond our control. Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons, coming in September!
Download or read book Nutshell written by Ian McEwan and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “suspenseful, dazzlingly clever and gravely profound” (The Washington Post) novel that brilliantly recasts Shakespeare and lends new weight to the age-old question of Hamlet's hesitation, from the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement. Trudy has been unfaithful to her husband, John. What’s more, she has kicked him out of their marital home, a valuable old London town house, and in his place is his own brother, the profoundly banal Claude. The illicit couple have hatched a scheme to rid themselves of her inconvenient husband forever. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month-old resident of Trudy’s womb. As Trudy’s unborn son listens, bound within her body, to his mother and his uncle’s murderous plans, he gives us a truly new perspective on our world, seen from the confines of his. Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons, coming in September!
Download or read book British and American Representations of 9 11 written by Oana-Celia Gheorghiu and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that twenty-first-century neorealist fiction is inspired by political and journalistic discourses and, along with them, constitutes one of the many representations of the attacks on September 11 and their outcomes. Adopting a neorealist stance, this book is placed at the intersection of realism and fiction, with often reference to what is perceived as objective writing (media and political texts), not at all so divorced from the practice of literary writings on the event that shook the world on September 11, 2001.
Download or read book The New Atheist Novel written by Arthur Bradley and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2010-02-11 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New Atheist Novel is the first study of a major new genre of contemporary fiction. It examines how Richard Dawkins's so-called 'New Atheism' movement has caught the imagination of four eminent modern novelists: Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Philip Pullman. For McEwan and his contemporaries, the contemporary novel represents a new front in the ideological war against religion, religious fundamentalism and, after 9/11, religious terror: the novel apparently stands for everything - freedom, individuality, rationality and even a secular experience of the transcendental - that religion seeks to overthrow. In this book, Bradley and Tate offer a genealogy of the New Atheist Novel: where it comes from, what needs it serves and, most importantly, where it may go in the future. What is it? How does it dramatise the war between belief and non-belief? To what extent does it represent a genuine ideological alternative to the religious imaginary or does it merely repeat it in secularised form? This fascinating study offers an incisive critique of this contemporary testament of literary belief and unbelief.
Download or read book Ian McEwan written by Dominic Head and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Imaginative Apologetics written by Andrew Davison and published by SCM Press. This book was released on 2014-07-28 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dynamic and constructive contribution to the discussion about faith and the new atheism. Apologetics is a key area of Christian theology, especially in an increasingly secular society. The authors explore what it means to do apologetics in an Anglican context.
Download or read book The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature written by Richard Bradford and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 912 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE WILEY BLACKWELL COMPANION TO CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AND IRISH LITERATURE An insightful guide to the exploration of modern British and Irish literature The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature is a must-have guide for anyone hoping to navigate the world of new British and Irish writing. Including modern authors and poets from the 1960s through to the 21st century, the Companion provides a thorough overview of contemporary poetry, fiction, and drama by some of the most prominent and noteworthy writers. Seventy-three comprehensive chapters focus on individual authors as well as such topics as Englishness and identity, contemporary Science Fiction, Black writing in Britain, crime fiction, and the influence of globalization on British and Irish Literature. Written in four parts, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature includes comprehensive examinations of individual authors, as well as a variety of themes that have come to define the contemporary period: ethnicity, gender, nationality, and more. A thorough guide to the main figures and concepts in contemporary literature from Britain and Ireland, this two-volume set: Includes studies of notable figures such as Seamus Heaney and Angela Carter, as well as more recently influential writers such as Zadie Smith and Sarah Waters. Covers topics such as LGBT fiction, androgyny in contemporary British Literature, and post-Troubles Northern Irish Fiction Features a broad range of writers and topics covered by distinguished academics Includes an analysis of the interplay between individual authors and the major themes of the day, and whether an examination of the latter enables us to appreciate the former. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Literature provides essential reading for students as well as academics seeking to learn more about the history and future direction of contemporary British and Irish Literature.
