INTERTEXTUAL LAYERS IN "AMSTERDAM" AND "SATURDAY": CULTURAL, HISTORICAL, AND LITERARY ALLUSIONS

This thesis examines the intertextual architecture of Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam (1998) and Saturday (2005), focusing on how cultural, historical, and literary allusions shape meaning, characterisation, and ethical argument in both novels. Drawing on Gerard Genette’s typology of transtextual relations and Julia Kristeva’s foundational concept of “intertextuality,” the study argues that McEwan deploys allusion for divergent purposes across the two texts: in Amsterdam, allusion to music, journalism, and public institutions serves an ironic, satirical function, while in Saturday, allusion to Matthew Arnold’s poetry, Virginia Woolf’s narrative form, and the 2003 Iraq War protests grounds the novel’s more earnest meditation on art’s redemptive power. The comparative analysis demonstrates that intertextuality in McEwan’s fiction is not a uniform stylistic device but a flexible tool calibrated to each novel’s ethical and generic aims.