A Study Of The Gothic Features In Nutshell

As one of the most influential writers in contemporary British literature,Ian McEwan won a great reputation as the “English national novelist.” Being a master of English,his writing style is featured by exquisite and minute,harsh and sharp as well as stark and solemn descriptions of a variety of inner uneasiness and fears of modern people,actively probing into the problems of violence,death,lust,good and evil.His early works show some features of Gothic literature,which,in his later works,is gradually integrated with postmodern elements,both contributing to the formation of his unique writing style,through which the themes of his later novels are forcefully expressed.His latest novel Nutshell(2016),a murder story narrated by an unborn fetus and a parody of Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet in the plot,clearly demonstrates his later style by combining his early focuses on grotesque and suffocating themes and recent concerns about social and humanistic issues,which is quite different from his previous works.While Nutshell inherits traditional elements of Gothic novels and follows the obscure and gloomy style in its description of the violence and incest in the novel,it is also found to break through the boundaries of Gothic novels by applying parody and intertextuality,making social problems,ethical and other issues the focuses of the novel.This thesis intends to explore the stylistic features in McEwan’s new book Nutshell,especially its innovations about the Gothic tradition from the perspective of intertextuality,on the basis of which the author discusses the unique writing technique used by McEwan in this novel,aiming to reveal how the writer successfully probe into the darkness of human nature more freely by employing fetus as the narrator.