"Are They Going to Say This Is Fantasy?": Kazuo Ishiguro, Untimely Genres, and the Making of Literary Prestige

This essay examines Ishiguro's latest novel, The Buried Giant, within the context of the recent turn to genre in contemporary Anglophone fiction. Specifically, it examines how a late twentieth-century valorization of historical fiction—one primarily associated with the Booker Prize and its brand of literary fiction—has translated into an interest in untimely forms of genre fiction. The dated, anachronistic forms of fantasy that we find in The Buried Giant, I argue, present Ishiguro with a way of replicating the sensation of pastness found in early Booker-winning novels—and to thereby stake a claim for his novel's cultural authority.