“And what stood in their way? Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience or easy manners, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and...

Both John Fowles in The Collector and Ian McEwan in Enduring Love use complex symbols and metaphors to expose the theme of obsession. In Enduring Love, the opening events and metaphor of the balloon act as a foreshadowing device for obsession....

In both “Twelfth Night” by William Shakespeare and “Enduring Love” by Ian McEwan, the pursuit of love is presented within the main characters. Their attempts to pursue a relationship could be seen as romantic and passionate; however, it could also...

Set in in England during the developments of World War II, Atonement is a multi-dimensional historical narrative that combines the ideas of fantasy versus fiction with love and war. As 13-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses the romance between her...

Ian McEwan’s Atonement draws inspiration from and alludes to a vast number of 20th century modernist authors and works, both stylistically and thematically. For a novel to be considered a successful culmination to the reading of a large body of...

In Ian McEwan’s award winning novel Atonement young Briony Tallis must try and make amends for her wrongdoings toward her older sister Cecelia and her love interest, Robbie. At the end of the novel, the short, twenty-page coda entitled “London,...

Both Briony Tallis, of Atonement, and Leo Colston, of The Go-Between, spend significant periods of their adolescence in large country homes, both of which are surrounded by large estates. Hartley and McEwan use the landscapes which are present...

In Atonement, Ian McEwan suggests the dangers of confusing our fantasies with reality; that we have become so accustomed to choosing to see what we wish to see rather than reality and this leads to destruction in our lives. Our refusal to accept...

In a very meta fashion, Atonement repeatedly places emphasis and raises questions about the significance and the role of the writer in literature. By eventually revealing that Briony has been the one penning the story all along, readers are left...

“I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High”-Psalms 82:6

It is an impossible task for an author not to project his or her own private biases onto a page. Theistic writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were...

British novelist Ian McEwan’s masterpiece Atonement can be appropriately compared to American writer Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men with the common denominating theme of intense experience—its opportunities and its ramifications....

“I put it all there as a matter of historical record… We will all only exist as my inventions. No one will care what events and which individuals were misinterpreted to make a novel… How can a novelist achieve atonement when… she is also God? In...

Ray Lawrence’s film Lantana and Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement share several key ideas that can be conveyed to the audience in similar ways. The guilt of betrayal, differences in class and the idea of love are all explored in depth by both author...

Through their respective texts, Atonement and Lantana, authors Ian McEwan and Ray Lawrence expertly convey the ideas of betrayal, atonement, loss and class. Within Atonement, McEwan employs stylistic features repetition, motif, symbolism and...

Theater and acting fundamentally allow people to become something else- to transcend the bounds of their identities and present, or be presented with, a different reality. The process of writing, a theme particularly prominent in ‘Atonement’, is...

In Atonement, McEwan reveals in the final section, ‘London, 1999,’ that the previous narrative had been a novel written by the character Briony, creating a metafictional lens and calling into question all the previous events the reader had assumed...

Throughout crime fiction such as ‘Atonement’ and ‘Brighton Rock’, unwitting characters fall to the machinations that antagonists - even immature antagonists - set for them. While some might argue that the characters in Graham Greene’s novel ‘...

Woven throughout Ian McEwan’s ‘Atonement’ are intertextual references, used to not only enrich the reader’s experience but to present the love affair between Robbie and Cecilia as indeed, all too familiar, classic and timeless in its...

Though Robbie Turner knows he is innocent of his purported crime, this knowledge hardly relieves his inner turmoil. Much of his time spent fighting in the war is also spent fighting with himself; he is unable to escape the constant fantasies of...

Truth is a universal theme that has been the fascination of people since the dawn of time. It is the underlying, almost primal reason that urges mankind to progress; a noble quest for knowledge, and an uneasiness that the essence of truth will...

Compare and contrast the representation of jealousy and the destructive nature of love in Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’, Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’, and Ian McEwen’s ‘Atonement’.

When comparing themes of jealousy and the destructive nature of love...

What does atonement mean to you? Each individual person will have to make up for something they have done at some point in their lifetime. Are you seeking atonement to be free from the burden of your sin in your everyday life? Maybe, you are...

In both McEwan’s Atonement and many of Carol Ann Duffy’s love poems, the use of postmodernist devices such as self-reflexivity and intertextuality aid in the exploration of their ideas and the pertinence of questions their work raises. James Wood...

New Criticism is a theory focused on the human experience. It guides the reader to examine conflict and tensions within a literary work, which emulate the complexity of the human condition. Ambiguity within texts allows for different...