NARRATIVES OF COMPLICITY - Politics and Form in Ian McEwan

Why does the novel so often find itself entangled in the very power structures it seeks to critique? In Narratives of Complicity, Cihan Yazgı investigates this paradox by reading Ian McEwan’s fiction as a series of “symbolic acts.” Through a rigorous symptomatic analysis (Fredric Jameson), Dr Yazgı exposes the “political unconscious” lurking beneath the surface of Britain’s most iconic contemporary prose.
The monograph charts three decades of transformation: from the imperial anxieties of The Cement Garden and the neoliberal shifts of The Child in Time, to the market-driven morality of the post-Cold War era in Amsterdam. Dr Yazgı demonstrates how these narratives exhibit a structural “complicity,” navigating—and often yielding to—dominant power relations and ideological constraints. Combining rigorous theoretical grounding with acute analysis, Narratives of Complicity restores historical vitality to the contemporary novel, making it essential reading for scholars of British literature, literary theory, and political form.