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The Re-occurrence and Reconstruction of History in Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me
ZENG Xiao-hui
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2022.11.006
University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China
Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me, published in 2019, depicts the parallel world of London in 1982, when artificial intelligence field was well beyond our current level of development. After Britain’s defeat in the Falklands War, Tony Benn was elected Prime Minister. And Alan Turing, the father of artificial intelligence, did not commit suicide. The storyline is full of intertextual expressions, with the setting beyond the British Isles and the narrative structure abandoning the coherence in the traditional novel in favour of a fragmented feature that closely integrates the individual with the society and the history. The paper analyses McEwan’s textual presentation of Britain’s post-World War II history from three perspectives: textual truth, historical fiction, and historical reflection, in the context of the New Historicism, and explores how McEwan approaches the deconstruction of power discourses and ideologies. This paper aims to achieve reflection on the past, concern for the present and early warning for the future under textuality of histories and historicity of text.
new historicism, Machines Like Me, textual truth, historical fiction
Journal of Literature and Art Studies, November 2022, Vol. 12, No. 11, 1127-1132
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