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In a reading of Ishiguro’s most affecting novel, Never Let Me Go, Peter Sloane situates the work in a longer context of clone and posthuman fictions, beginning with Frankenstein, Brave New World and Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. Informed by and developing from Suzanne Keen, Martha Nussbaum, and Anne Whitehead’s important and influential insights into the complicated causal relationship between novel reading and the capacity for empathy, Sloane proposes that literary fiction has a peculiar power to provoke empathy, but that empathy is predicated on finding in its subject something which resembles the ‘human’, an uncovering of shared values, shared traits, shared hopes. However, he argues, Never Let Me Go very deliberately resists readings of the clones as human, and rather fosters an empathetic environment in which compassion is founded not on our shared humanity but on our shared posthumanity. The novel very pointedly highlights the various ways in which the clones, Kathy H. and her small, tragic band of friends, not simply lack fundamental human attributes but are in fact defined by these apparent absences (futurity, fertility, self-actuation). Yet as Sloane argues, in the posthuman age and in the contemporary novel, ‘both text and reader need to be epistemologically and even ontologically resituated in relation to the refiguration of the humanities to the posthumanities’.
This volume is an extensive edited collection devoted to the work of the 2017 Nobel Literature Laureate, Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, featuring contributions from the most established Ishiguro scholars. It contains major new chapters on each of his novels, including the first published essay on Klara and the Sun as well as his short-story collection Nocturnes and his screenplays. Situating Ishiguro’s work within current debates regarding modernism, postmodernism and postcolonialism, the chapters examine his engagement with the defining concerns of the contemporary novel, including national identity, Britishness, cosmopolitanism, memory, biotechnology, terrorism, Brexit, immigration and populist politics. Discussing Ishiguro as both a British and a global author, the collection contributes to debates regarding the politics of publishing of ethnic writers, examining how Ishiguro has managed to shape a career in resistance to narrow labelling where many other writers have struggled to achieve long-term recognition. The collection opens with an extensive introduction by the co-editors which examines Ishiguro’s body of work as a whole and Ishiguro’s evolving literary reputation in light of his recent personal and commercial success. The book then offers individual chapters on each of Ishiguro’s novels, his short-story collection and his television and film work, as well as his recent journalistic interventions. Each chapter aims to extend and update existing criticism on Ishiguro via engagement with the most up-to-date critical frameworks, while at the same time staying true to each text’s most prominent thematic concerns. Given the prominence of its contributors and its comprehensive coverage, Kazuo Ishiguro: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives will be the definitive volume of Ishiguro scholarship for years to come.
This extensive critical introduction examines Ishiguro’s work in the context of global identities and literary inheritance. The introduction then provides a detailed breakdown of the individual chapters on each of Ishiguro’s novels, his short-story collection and his film and television screenwriting.