{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0287569573283859, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.384615384615385, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
“Before the Destruction Began”: Interrupting Post-Imperial Melancholia in Ian McEwan’s Atonement

This essay argues that Ian McEwan’s Atonement articulates and comments on the condition of post-imperial British melancholia (as described by Paul Gilroy) through its engagement with canonical English literary history. Atonement is both a country-house novel and a World War Two narrative, two genres that are particularly bound up in contemporary British self-understanding. However, because the novel is also a failed speech-act—the fact that it cannot atone for the crimes it represents is overdetermined—the novel aligns its self-knowing, performative ‘afterwardsness’ with Gilroy’s sense that a ‘more productive shame’ about Britain’s imperial past is possible. I argue that the structure of Atonement continually generates ironies, conditioning a posthumous mode of wary reading that situates the novel as a coda to a certain insular English novel tradition. In so doing, the novel points beyond itself to a more expansive notion of Englishness and to another kind of novel.