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Family and Relationships in Ian McEwan's Fiction

Between Fantasy and Desire
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The book provides a lucid analysis of all Ian McEwan fiction published to date, from his 1975 debut short stories up to the 2016 novel Nutshell, spanning forty years of his literary career. Apart from a general discussion of McEwan's works, the study offers a uniform focal point: it concentrates on one of the key issues taken up by the writer - the aspect of relationships between partners and between family members. As the book demonstrates, the novelist employs interpersonal relations to establish a pertinent context in which he can dramatically portray the process of identity formation in his characters. Throughout his fiction, McEwan consistently uses references to psychoanalysis, either veiled or direct. The proposed book investigates the novelist's oeuvre through the lens of the psychoanalytic theory developed by Jacques Lacan. The approach used makes the book useful both for readers well familiar with this apparatus, and for those who need introduction to Lacanian psychoanalysis and such of his concepts as "desire," "fantasy," "the symbolic order" or " the Name-of-the-Father."
Introduction Part 1: Beginnings Chapter 1: Disturbing Proximity and Grotesque Proportions When It Comes to First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets Chapter 2: The Oedipal Siblings in The Cement Garden of Eden Chapter 3: Anchoring The Comfort Of Strangers in the Sadistic Paternal Superego Part 2: Developments Chapter 4: The Child in Time and the Child Within Chapter 5: The Precariousness of The Innocent Childish Masculinity Chapter 6: The Traumatic Encounter with Black Dogs and the Real Chapter 7: Enduring Love, Childlessness, Unreliability, and the Enigma of the Other's Desire Part 3: Maturity Chapter 8: The Path Toward Death via Amsterdam Chapter 9: The Recognition of Otherness in the Fantasy of Atonement Chapter 10: The Pacifying Saturday Fantasy of a Non-pacifist Chapter 11: The Big Other Is Watching You Even On Chesil Beach Part 4: Recent Fiction Chapter 12: Solar and the Unbearable Heaviness of Desire Chapter 13: The Opalescent Sweet Tooth of Deceptive Manipulation Chapter 14: How The Children Act to Effect the Split Between Psychological and Symbolic Identity Chapter 15: Craving the Mother's Desire in a Nutshell Conclusion: Love Will Tear Us Apart?
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