CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Vol. 20 No.1 | March 2018

Call for Papers

“Approaching Ian McEwan: Narratological Perspectives”

Deadline for Submission: 31 December 2017

   As “a major voice in contemporary British Fiction” (Quigley 436) and “the best British writer of his generation” (436), Ian McEwan has been widely known by the diversity of his subject matter, which is “as varied as his choice of genre, alternating between sadomasochism (which earned him early in his career the title Ian MacAbre) and feminism, between historical fiction and contemporary psychological intrigue.” (436). An author of two short story collections, fourteen novels, two children’s fictions, two plays, three screen plays, one oratorio, and one libretto, McEwan has received a wide range of scholarly attention, which is evidenced in a number of important critical works. Among them are Kiernan Ryan’s Ian McEwan (1994), Jack Slay’s Ian McEwan (1996), Peter Childs’s The Fiction of Ian McEwan (2005), David Malcolm’s Understanding Ian McEwan (2002), Dominic Head’s Ian McEwan (2008), Lynn Wells’s Ian McEwan (2009), Pascal Nicklas’s Ian McEwan: Art and Politics (2009), Sebastian Groes’s Ian McEwan: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (2009/2013), and Swantje Möller’s Coming to Terms with Crisis: Disorientation and Reorientation in the Novels of Ian McEwan (2011), all of which have drastically advanced the scholarship of McEwan.   It needs to be pointed out that McEwan’s fictions are not only diversified in their subject matter but also rich in their narrative strategies. Unlike those existing critical works, “Approaching Ian McEwan: Narratological Perspectives”, a Thematic Issue of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 20.1 (March 2018): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb> guest edited by Biwu Shang (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) aims at examining salient narrative features of McEwan’s writings, his fictions in particular, mainly from narratological perspectives. Contributions are invited from any sub-strands of narratology and might include, but are not limited to, the following topics: 

1. unreliable narration in Ian McEwan’s fictions

2. character narration in Ian McEwan’s fictions

3. gendered narration in Ian McEwan’s fictions

4. unnatural narratives in Ian McEwan’s fictions

5. transgeneric narratives in Ian McEwan’s fictions

6. spatial narratives in Ian McEwan’s fictions

7. narrative temporality in Ian McEwan’s fictions

8. narrative ethics in Ian McEwan’s fictions

9. meta-narratives and meta-narration in Ian McEwan’s fictions

10. fictionality and factuality in Ian McEwan’s fictions

Please submit papers in 6000-7000 words by 31 December 2017 to Biwu Shang at <biwushang@sjtu.edu.cn>. For the style of the journal, please consult <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweblibrary/clcwebstyleguide>. Articles published in the journal are double-blind peer reviewed and indexed in the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, the Thomson Reuters ISI Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI), Scopus, etc. The guest editor encourages potential contributors to establish early contact via email to biwushang@sjtu.edu.cn.