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Class experience in McEwan's atonement
journal contribution
posted on 2015-06-25, 12:14 authored by Ian FraserIan McEwan's critically acclaimed novel Atonement has attracted a number of different interpretations across many themes. However, there has been little attention paid to the issue of class in this work. I seek to rectify this lacuna by offering an examination of the novel utilizing the understanding of class developed by E. P. Thompson. Thompson understands class as a historical relationship that is developed over time and is associated with core concepts such as class experience, class consciousness, class struggle, class hegemony, and fetishism. I use these categories to examine the main characters such as Robbie, Cecilia, and Paul Marshall to illuminate and enhance our understanding of the class contradictions present in the novel. This not only demonstrates the richness of Thompson's framework but also the quality of McEwan's own writing on what he sees as the important issue of class. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Politics and International Studies
Published in
Critique - Studies in Contemporary FictionVolume
54Issue
4Pages
465 - 477Citation
FRASER, I., 2013. Class experience in McEwan's atonement. Critique - Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 54 (4), pp. 465 - 477.Publisher
© Taylor & Francis GroupVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2013Notes
This article is closed access.ISSN
0011-1619eISSN
1939-9138Publisher version
Language
- en