Bringing together an international group of scholars, this collection offers a fresh assessment of Kazuo Ishiguro’s evolving significance as a contemporary world author. The contributors take on a range of the aesthetic and philosophical themes that characterize Ishiguro’s work, including his exploration of the self, family, and community; his narrative constructions of time and space; and his assessments of the continuous and discontinuous forces of history, art, human psychology, and cultural formations. Significantly, the volume attends to Ishiguro’s own self-identification as an international writer who has at times expressed his uneasiness with being grouped together with British novelists of his generation. Taken together, these rich considerations of Ishiguro’s work attest to his stature as a writer who continues to fascinate cultural and textual critics from around the world.
Global Ishiguro. Introduction: Ishiguro and his worlds in literature. Part 1 Crossing National and Aesthetic Borders: Kazuo Ishiguro and 'imagining Japan'. Reworking myths: stereotypes and genre conventions in Kazuo Ishiguro's work. Memory, nostalgia and recognition in Ishiguro's works. 'You never know who you're addressing': a study of the inscribed 'you' in The Remains of the Day. Ishiguro and Heidegger: the worlds of art. Part 2 Translations of Culture, Space, and Time: The Unconsoled: piano virtuoso lost in Vienna. Place identity and detection in When We Were Orphans. What Kathy knew: hidden plot in Never Let Me Go. 'How dare you claim these children are anything less than fully human?': the shared precariousness of life as a foundation for ethics in Never Let Me Go. Time and the threefold I in Never Let Me Go. Cosmos of similitude in Nocturnes. Oppositional narratives of Nocturnes.
Biography
Cynthia F. Wong is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado Denver, USA, and Hulya Yildizis Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Language Education at Middle East Technical University, Turkey.
“Like the lego bricks Cheng evokes to describe Ishiguro's short story collection, the individual arguments do assemble into a colourful, multifarious and yet cohesive appraisal of Ishiguro's global appeal.” - Dorothee Birke, Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies
