Abstract

Abstract:

This essay intervenes in recent claims about Kazuo Ishiguro's affective and narrative universalism as writer of global Anglophone literature. It does so by situating his work as crucially mediated by a generic Asianness. Specifically, it reads his first two Japanese historical novels (A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World) alongside his last two hyper-specific British historical novels (Never Let Me Go and The Buried Giant). While this arc might be read in terms of a shift from ethnographic realism to speculative genre fiction, this essay reads Ishiguro's early and later work dialectically through his recurring melancholic narrator to show how his later British novels allows us to reexamine his earlier Japanese fictions as also deeply generic

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