Briony's Stand Against Oblivion in Atonement

Measured on sales figures and popularity, Ian McEwan may be considered as the most successful and accomplished writer in contemporary British literature. His triumph in the competition of the Man Booker Prize in 1998 proved that he could also win the best acclaims from the circle of pure literature. His novel Atonement (2001), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for fiction in 2001 and stayed at the top of the best seller lists of the New York Times for many weeks, has been regarded as a masterpiece by many famous professional book critics and a milestone of the author's own literature career.

The very reasons why this novel gained such a wide praise include not only the concise language, vivid description of pastorale scenery, war scenes and human psychology, but also some other more important characteristics to make it a masterpiece, among which one of the most distinctive is its renewal of the traditional "Jane Austen novel" with intertextual features.

The intertextuality in it, that's on which this thesis rests. The concept of the intertextuality can be traced back to, the initiator of this theory, French theorist Julia Kriesteva's original theory. She took intertextuality as a transpositional process from one sign system to another, including the exchange and permutation, repositioning of the sign system, involving the transformation or even the destruction of the old sign system and the creation or formation of a new one. During this process, new works were created from old ones.

Atonement is a typical example of this theory. It follows the trend of the contemporary literature development in Britain, the combination of tradition and innovations. As McEwan acknowledged, he treated it as his "Jane Austen novel", for it inherited some elements from Jane Austen, the design of character and some narrative skills of Austen. But as a contemporary writer, he must add some modern or even postmodern features to his writings so as to differentiate himself from the antecedents. The way he transcended Jane Austen's writing is just the radically employment of the intertextuality. In this novel, the creation of three hidden texts composed one after another by Briony, a main heroine, with the body of the novel from McEwan himself's perspective, formed very instinct internal intertextual relationships with each other. In other words, the creation of each new text is on the basis of the transformation of the former one. It's a very obvious transpositional process. These intertextual features make Atonement quite a postmodern novel, while integrates some characteristics of the classical British literature. From this angle, this thesis will interpret the artistic value of the novel Atonement and attempt to reveal the relationship between inheritance and innovation in literature creation.