Generic Considerations in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro's novel about human clones raised for organs, is most often critiqued as science fiction or dystopian literature by the scholarly community. Yet focusing on the institutional implementation of cloning obscures a more critically fertile theme: sentiment. As demonstrated in this article, the novel has deeper affinities with sentimental and abolitionist literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than with speculative fiction. This generic reevaluation makes way for a broader critical approach to the novel's notion of humanness in the post-genome age.