Between Historical Fact And Literary Creation

Ian McEwan is one of the most prominent contemporary English writers. His increasing popularity and wide readership is closely connected with his transition from depicting narrow personal life to broad social reality. These days his major interest lies in the exploration of relationship between the public and the private life, and historical fiction is one of the best forms for his exploration. In the novel Black Dogs, he fabricated historical facts with fictional characters to represent a postwar Europe.This thesis, inspired by the interpretative framework of New Historicism, especially the concepts of historicity and textuality, histories and subversion, examines how Ian McEwan subverts public history through his fiction and the view of literature and history he holds in Black Dogs.The thesis argues that McEwan, by means of metaphor, intertextuality and focalization, skillfully interweaves his personal understanding of life and history with characters’fate and let historical facts interact with characters’personal fate. The uncertainties of history McEwan portrays show his great concerns about the society and mankind. He wants to remind people of the haunting effects of violence, the redemptive power of love and the significance of history.