An Interpretation Of Ian McEwan's Black Dogs From The Perspective Of Historiographic Metafiction

Ian McEwan(1848-)is an outstanding British contemporary novelist.His early works were mainly related to some dark topics,such as violence,death and incest,etc.,which established him as "Ian Macabre".Since the mid-1980s,he began to pay more attention to the political,social and ecological issues in his writing.Black Dogs is one of his later works.This thesis is an interpretation of Ian McEwan's Black Dogs from the point of view of Linda Hutcheon's Historiographic Metafiction,a postmodern term,which is intensely self-reflective and problematic in the relationships between history and fiction.Linda Hutcheon mainly discusses the term of Historiographic Metafiction in her books of A Poetics of Postmodernism:History,Theory,Fiction(1988)and The Politics of Postmodernism(1989).In her discussion,she hasn't referred to Ian McEwan's Black Dogs so far.Based on the theory of historiographic metafiction,this thesis is the first Master's study to interpret Ian McEwan's Black Dogs from the perspective of historiographic metafiction and to argue that Black Dogs has some common nature to historiographic metafiction.The thesis attempts to prove that Black Dogs and historiographic metafiction share homogeneity in form and contents.Black Dogs consists of two modes of narration:One is unreliable multi-layered narration,including mise-en-abyme and multiple internal focalizations,which are equal to historiographic metafiction's privileged narrative modes.The other narrative mode is intertextuality,referring to the past,which discusses the relationship between history and fiction in Black Dogs.Formally,Black Dogs is a book of historiographic metafiction.Black Dogs also presents self-reflectivity in its contents.On the one hand,Black Dogs refers to many historical events,such as "the fall of the Berlin Wall" and "the building of Nazi concentration camps",etc..This thesis compares personal account of history and master narrative of history,and the discrepancies between these two versions leads readers into a field of reflection on historical writing.Historiographic metafiction is the rework of the factual historical events and the self-reflectivity of the metafiction.On the other hand,from the micro-perspective such as the relationships in families,Black Dogs exhibits ethical choices such as rationalism,mysticism,sensibility and skepticism,etc.With no preference,Ian McEwan presents the ideological debates in human beings to inspire readers to rethink issues of ethics,history and politics and so forth.In conclusion,the theory of historiographic metafiction is conductive for reader to gain deeper understanding of Ian McEwan's Black Dogs.