This volume analyzes the works of British novelist Ian McEwan. It considers the problematic claim that McEwan is possibly the most significant of a number of writers who have resuscitated the link between morality and the novel for a whole generation, in ways that befit the historical pressures of their time. Some of McEwan's works reviewed in this volume include The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers and The Child in Time.

This chapter examines the significant role played by allegory and Spenser's The Faerie Queene in Shakespeare's King Lear. It emphasises the expansiveness of Shakespeare's allegorical mode and presents a reading of King Lear that features the complexity of Shakespeare's allegory, the explosive arrival of the human character and the treatment of Spenserian themes. The chapter also explores the poetic theory present in Shakespeare's time, which can help explain the particular nature of the allegory used in King Lear, and the allegorical method of King Lear.

This concluding chapter discusses the relation of Ian McEwan's works in relation to the so-called ‘third culture’. It suggests that McEwan's contribution to the ‘third culture’ reveals structural affinities with the double consciousness of modernism and also embodies an intensification of modernist self-consciousness. This chapter suggests that McEwan's unsettling art upsets the equilibrium of knowledge and experience that modernism held out as a fleeting possibility.

This chapter discusses ghost characters in six Irish plays: Conor McPherson's award-winning The Weir, Shining City, Stewart Parker's Pentecost and three plays by Marina Carr: The Mai, Portia Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats. The return of a figure from the past is a frequent occurrence in Irish plays. These plays were chosen out of the explosion of Irish dramatic talent on the London stage in the 1990s and the opening years of the twenty-first century, because of the nature of their representation of time. McPherson's, and, even more obviously, Carr's, investment in the past lives of their characters creates static, liminal, worlds where ghosts multiply. The chapter ends with Carnesky's Ghost Train, which emulated a ride on a fairground ghost train, encapsulated the idea of stasis.

This chapter analyzes Ian McEwan's Atonement as the creative equivalent or counterpart of narrative ethics. The theme of guilt and atonement is inextricably linked to an investigation of the writer's authority, a process of self-critique conducted through the creation of the writing persona Briony Tallis. This novel establishes a position that represents a mid-ground between the privileging of the autonomous speaking subject and the dissolution of self into larger social and linguistic codes and it evokes a strong sense of lived experience that is morally moving, and yet insists on the constructed nature of fiction and the morally dubious authority wielded by the writer.

Bryony Lavery's Frozen uses elements of a fairy tale as pegs on which to hang her portrayal of a mother's quest for her lost daughter. This chapter analyses a selection of journalists' accounts of the children's deaths in relation to Frozen. It also discusses Shelagh Stephenson's award-winning The Memory of Water, Alice Sebold's highly acclaimed novel, The Lovely Bones, and Martin McDonagh's play, The Pillowman.

This book examines laughter in the Shakespearean theatre in the context of a cultural history of early modern laughter. Few cultural phenomena have undergone as radical a change in meaning as laughter, which today automatically triggers positive associations: pleasure, relaxation and a response to humour. When William Shakespeare refers to laughter, he evokes the conventional associations of frivolity, immorality and folly. Two brief passages might serve as examples, one in Troilus and Cressida and another in The Merchant of Venice. The early modern age saw a number of important developments in the history of laughter. This book looks at a number of them in separate chapters. The most crucial of these developments was the evolving culture of courtly manners. The book also considers attacks on laughter by Puritans and religious reformers, and, finally, takes a closer look at the book that launched the idea of the wise fool, Erasmus' Praise of Folly.