Author

● Born 21 June 1948.

● English novelist and screenwriter.
● Early career: Gothic short stories.
● His first two novels The Cement Garden
(1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981)
earned him the nickname "Ian Macabre".
● These were followed by three novels of
some success in the 1980s and early 1990s.
● His novel Enduring Love (1997) was
adapted into a film (same title).
● He won the Man Booker Prize with
Amsterdam (1998).
● His following novel, Atonement (2001), garnered acclaim and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring
Keira Knightley and James McAvoy.
● This was followed by Saturday (2005), On Chesil Beach (2007), Solar (2010), Sweet Tooth (2012), The Children Act (2014),
Nutshell (2016), and Machines Like Me (2019).
● He was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 2011.
Reception
● ‘A slow, suffocating build-up of tension from a master of suspense; his
most powerful novel to date’ (Sunday Times)
● ‘The narrative, as always with McEwan, smoulders with slow-
burning menace. You know that, even as you savour the voluptuous
sentences, something terrible will happen, and sure enough it does’
(The Times)
● ‘Atonement is a magnificent novel, shaped and paced with awesome
confidence and eloquence’ (Independent)
● ‘Nobody writes about England and the English better than McEwan,
and this is one of his most powerful novels’ (Sunday Express)
● ‘McEwan’s new novel is art of the highest kind… Atonement creates a
pre-war atmosphere with a subtlety that is utterly compelling.. A
● publication cemented Ian
McEwan’s reputation
● Atonement shortlisted for
the 2001 Booker Prize for
Fiction
● the novel won several prizes
● Atonement was adapted into a
movie directed by Joe Wright
from screenplay by
Christopher Hampton
● McEwan’s novel has been not
only positively received by
critics but also is a subject
Imagination
● one of the most prevailing motifs in the book
● mostly connected to Briony and her “imaginative” world; a
comfort zone
● both destructive
a dangerous and life-
tool that fuels the action
giving
● How do we know it’s
Briony’s imagination and
not something real?

different perspectives on
various events

● some instances of Briony’s

the fountain scene
the letter scene
the library scene
the rape scene (Lola)
Other instances of Briony’s “imaginative power”
The imaginary (yet happy) ending
Conclusions?
Critics on Briony
● “She is the cause of the tension that the
novel depends on and is also the means for
reminding the readers that this is a work of
fiction.”
● “she is as much of a threat to the order of
the household as she presumes Robbie to be.”
Critics on the story and the
power of imagination
● “unsettling interpretation of how the
fantasist, that is the writer, has the power
to order lives.”
● “Her dangerous imagination [...] becomes the
necessary drama of the plot.”
● “excessive imagination”
● “her [...] imagination create[s] the
misunderstandings that not only wreak
havoc on the lives of those around her, but
also force her to understand, though not
fully, as it is revealed at the end of the
novel, the irreversible and adverse effects of
inventing stories and modelling her
behaviour on a constructed world.”
●
Metafiction in Atonement - The Trials of Arabella
● Atonement - fiction within fiction
● The Trials of Arabelle as a synecdoche, mimicking the actual story of
Atonement
● Briony as a writer not only of The Trials but also the author of
Atonement
○ is the story of Robbie and Cecilia pure fiction just as was
Arabella’s?
● Atonement as Briony’s lifelong attempt at atonement for ruining two
innocent people’s lives
Atonement as Künstlerroman
● Briony#1 - young and naive, her stories also simple and naive, yet -
unstable situation, rising action, climax and stable situation.
○ Good always conquers evil and is followed by a happy ending.
○ Briony gains insight into the grown-up world and learns that
not everything is clear and obvious
● Briony #2 - writer behind the appearance of a nurse. She writes her
diary in code. Still occupied with herself, but now she sees that her
problems are not of great importance to anyone else. Her
personality - not that much different; her writing style and
attitude towards writing - has changed significantly.
● Briony #3 - 77-years-old woman. Though she probably has changed a
great deal there are parts of her that remain the same. Briony is
suffering from dementia.
○ The author part of her however has made a long journey; from
the naïve, simple writing style she had when we first met her,
through the experimental style of her youth and then finally
a mixture of them both.
Intertextuality in Atonement and beyond that

● “Atonement is the epitome of intertextuality” — what exactly does

it mean?
● What is intertextuality?
● Classic realist novel (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert)
—> Modernist novel (Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Henry James) —
> WWII literature —> [Postmodernist novel] (John Fowles) —>
“London, 1999”, metamodernist novel? ethical turn?
● Atonement could not be possible “without all the experiments in
Intertextual references: Pre-Victorian
● Epigraph from Austen’s Northanger Abbey — introduction to
intertextuality;
● “My Jane Austen novel, my country house novel, my one-hot day
novel”;
● Cecilia reading Richardson’s Clarissa, a tale of rape and atonement;

● The ‘gene’ of irony, the dangers of imagination,

country house setting,
the subtle challenge to class difference
(The Tallises VS The Turners),
the playfulness with literary genres,
Intertextual References: Victorian
● Atonement as “re-redeading of the classic realistic novel”;
● “As we have seen McEwan’s realism holds up nicely polished mirror
to show us reality, but with Atonement he allows us to experience
the ethics of writing and reading that reality” © Judith Seaboyer
● George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert;

● The ‘gene’ of – surprise! – realistic fiction, the notion of the

characters, attempts to describe the mind of characters, common
down-to-earth but still tragedy, and many more.
Intertextual References: Modernist

● Atonement as “the displacement of the modernist novel” © Brian

Finney
● “Woolf acts both as positive and negative influence on the novel” ©
Brian Finney
● The book structure similar to To the Lighthouse;
● The ‘gene’ of impressionistic prose, wild but doomed sexual
attraction, pre-WWII upper class setting, shifting perspective,
stream of of of of of of consciousness, experiments with time, and
Intertextual Reference: WWII
● Mixing of the genre of war literature: WWI + WWII;
● WWII being perceived as the end of modernism — Briony’s letter of
rejection from Horizon;
● Sources of Parts 3: Lucilia Andrews’ No Time For Romance (1997) and The
Memoirs of Mrs. A Radloff – a nurse’s perspective on Dunkirk;

● The ‘gene’ of war, memoirs, suffering, love letters, the end of the
modernist world, and many more.
Intertextual References: [Postmodernist]
● John Fowles’ French Lieutenant’s Woman as a reference point for
Atonement:

“A similar [to Fowles’ novel] impulse underwrites Atonement. It is a

less about novelist harking nostalgically back to the consoling
uncertainties of the past than it is about creatively extending and
having a defining part of British literary tradition up to and into
the twenty-first century” © Geoff Dyer

● The ‘gene’ of intertextuality (ha-ha), multiple endings,

deconstructing the conventional format of the novel, metafiction,
various small references and allusions (Tilney’s Hotel), and many
The Nature of Intertextuality in Atonement:
Metamodernism & Ethical Turn?

● Atonement “offers a passionate, ethical agreement against postmodern

fabulasim, reasserting the difference between historical and
fictional forms of narrative and creating a new form of the
historiographical metafiction” © Natasha Alden
● Who is in fact atoning and for what? Let’s speculate!
● Briony’s development as a writer = the historiography of the
British literary tradition;
● The exhaustion of postmodernism?
● Metamodernism theory by Vermeulen and van den Akker.
Sources
1. Cassigneul, Adèle, and Elsa Cavalié. "‘and Above All to Make You See’: Vision,
Imagination and the Aesthetics of Montage in Atonement." Études Britanniques
Contemporaines. (2018). Print.
2. COJOCARU, Monica. "Narrative Ethics Imagination and Empathy in Ian
Mcewan’s Atonement." Logos Universality Mentality Education Novelty: Philosophy
and Humanistic Sciences. 3.2 (2015): 67-75. Print
3. Ellam, Julie. Ian Mcewan's Atonement. London, 2009. Computer file.
4. On the author: WIKIPEDIA
5. McEwan, Ian. Atonement. New York, 2017. Anchor Books. Print.