Ian McEwan, The Cockroach

Anastasia Logotheti (Deree-The American College of Greece)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain , 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Gina Lyle (University of Glasgow), Graham MacPhee (University of Manchester), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Jenni Ramone (The Nottingham Trent University)

Dates

First circulation or publication Sep 2019

Places

United Kingdom (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Prose Fiction Narrative
Satire

Resources

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Recommended Reading

Published in September 2019, only a few months after

Machines Like Me

(April 2019), Ian McEwan’s satirical novella

The Cockroach

constitutes an imaginative response to the long-drawn debate regarding Brexit. Influenced by the Brexit crisis developing at the time of the writing and publication of

Machines Like Me

(2016-2019), a novel which includes in its alternative version of the past a narrowly avoided departure from the EU, McEwan offers in

The Cockroach

a comic allegory. An inversion of Franz Kafka’s

Metamorphosis

in which the eponymous insect wakes up to find he is inhabiting the body of Jim Sams, Britain’s Prime Minister, the novella is, in the author’s words, “political satire” in the tradition of Jonathan Swift (Runciman) whose famous essay “A Modest Proposal”…

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Citation: Logotheti, Anastasia. "The Cockroach". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 January 2020 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=38984, accessed 25 April 2024.]

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