![]() ![]() ![]() McEwan commented that, in having Briony originally bury “her conscience beneath her stream of consciousness” in “Two Figures,” he wished Atonement “to enter into a conversation with modernism and its dereliction of duty in relation to the backbone of plot” (qtd. C.” (that is, Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon). The reader’s starting point is that Atonement began life as a modernist, more specifically Woolfian, short story called “Two Figures by a Fountain,” sent to “C. ![]() An important part of that “hedging in”-and, yes, even diminution-derives from the novel’s relationship to modernism. ![]() I agree with Dominic Head’s conclusion that “ Atonement serves, if not to diminish the literary, then to hedge it in with many damaging reservations” (173). The novel is distinct from the rest of Ian McEwan’s work in the sheer literariness of its self-fashioning, but its sense of canonical ancestry is, we find, consolatory rather than complacent. Atonement’s highly allusive relationship with the canonical English novel, from Samuel Richardson and Jane Austen onward, seems to suggest the confident belle lettrism of an established author making a bid for a place in the Senior Common Room of English Literature. ![]()
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