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 York), 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

Save to Bookshelf

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”…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

2172 words

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 November 2024.]

View recommended reading for this article

Ian McEwan, The Cockroach

Dates

Places

Genres and Modes

Resources

Save this article

Leave Feedback