Ian McEwan's works have always shown an interest in the question of how fiction operates. This interest does not usually manifest on the formal level. A few of the early stories aside, his fictions are not formally experimental. McEwan tends to opt for those reliable patternings of space, time and narrative progression that enable readers to trust the authorial environment sufficiently to identify with characters and become invested, to some extent, in what happens to them. Despite McEwan's commitment, by and large, to naturalistic means of telling a story, his later novels also demonstrate a concern with opacity, as characters often pursue courses of action for reasons that are unclear to them. Equally often, these actions bear some relation to the intrinsic opacity or enigma of one's sexual desires, one's relation to one's mortality, or one's relation to the actions of those human beings who have gone before one, as this book will show. It is this focus on enigma in McEwan's work, whether sexual, mortal, or historical, that lends it to a psychoanalytic reading such as the kind pursued in this book, because for psychoanalysis there is no such thing as full access to one's self or to one's feelings or motivations. Given that one's relation to history is also opaque in the sense that one grasps fully-or imagines one grasps fully-only those historical events which predate or otherwise excludes one, this study seeks historical reasons for why McEwan sometimes blocks readerly identification with characters in the early fiction. For these characters are also products of their environments, environments which the characters' relative opacity and unlikeability seems to offset and exaggerate or present in a manner showcased for one's judgment. And in this way the characters' environment is denaturalized, to say the least. This book reveals how all of these works explore, to some extent, the human tendency to act and feel, in particular situations, in profound contradistinction to how one might prefer to think one would. This failure to coincide with one's image of how one would have expected, or preferred, to behave-The Innocent's Leonard Marnham is not the cool, experienced lover of his imaginings, any more than Solar's Michael Beard is going to revamp his lifestyle or career-produces instances of affective or imaginative excess, troubling images or feelings that can often only be allayed or dealt with by a further failure to coincide with one's desires. In this book, author Eluned Summers-Bremner shows that McEwan's interests in opacity not only become clear in significance and import but that his interests in human failure to coincide with one's views about the past and hopes for the future also appear as what they are: an ongoing concern with how one relates to the complex operation of human history.

This book explores how, far from being limited to deviation from known pathways or desirable plans of action, wandering is an abundant source of meaning, as intimately involved in the history of our universe as it will be in the future of our planet. In ancient Australian Aboriginal cosmology, in works about the origins of democracy and surviving disasters in ancient Greece, in Eurasian steppe nomadic culture, in the lifeways of the Rom, in the movements of today’s refugees and in our attempts to preserve spaces of untracked online freedom, wandering is the means by which creativity and skills of adaptation are preserved in the interests of ongoing life. Astray is an enthralling look at belonging, and at notions of alienation and hope.

Essays illustrating the range and diversity of post-1970 British women writers. Despite the enduring popularity of contemporary women's writing, British women writers have received scant critical attention. They tend to be overshadowed by their American counterparts in the media and have come to be represented within the academy almost exclusively by Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson. This collection celebrates the range and diversity of contemporary (post-1970) British women writers. It challenges misconceptions about the natureand scope of fiction by women writers working in Britain - commonly dismissed as parochial, insular, dreary and domestic - and seeks to expand conventional definitions of "British" by exploring how issues of nationality intersectwith gender, class, race and sexuality. Writers covered include Pat Barker, A.L. Kennedy, Maggie Gee, Rukhsana Ahmad, Joan Riley, Jennifer Johnston, Ellen Galford, Susan Hill, Fay Weldon, Emma Tennant, and Helen Fielding. Contributors: DAVID ELLIS, CLARE HANSON, MAROULA JOANNOU, PAULINA PALMER, EMMA PARKER, FELICITY ROSSLYN, CHRISTIANE SCHLOTE, JOHN SEARS, ELUNED SUMMERS-BREMNER, IMELDA WHELEHAN, GINA WISKER.