The ends of history : the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro, Timothy Mo and Graham Swift

Julian Barnes (b. 1946) is an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist who received considerable praise in 1984 with the publication of Flaubert’s Parrot, a book that, together with A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989), defies categorization. Barnes belongs to a generation of British writers (including Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and Graham Swift) who came to prominence in the 1980s at a time when suspicion toward the main tenets of realism, foundational grand narratives‚ and the figure of the stable and reliable narrator led many authors to disrupt and subvert conventional modes, favor historiographical metafiction and postmodernist skepticism‚ and experiment with narrative strategies. Thus, a number of scholars have examined Barnes’s work through the prism of postmodernism on the grounds of the metafictional dimension of some of his books, his transgression of realist strategies and reliance on various forms of intertextuality, and his mistrust of truth claims and fondness for fragmentation, polyphony‚ and generic hybridity. Several of his books (fictional and nonfictional) have been analyzed for the way in which they challenge the borders that separate existing genres, texts, arts‚ and languages and, thereby, oscillate among novel, essay, biography‚ and meditation. However‚ the restrictive label of postmodernism can apply to only part of Barnes’s production‚ as other novels published throughout his career are inscribed within a more conventional and realistic framework—in particular, such early books as Metroland (1980), Before She Met Me (1981), and Staring at the Sun (1986)—and his most recent production is marked by a less ironic and subversive mood and a more personal, subdued‚ and melancholy tone, for example in The Sense of an Ending (2011), which won the Man Booker Prize; The Noise of Time (2016); and The Only Story (2018). Barnes has also been praised for his art as an essayist and a short-story writer. Drawing from a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, scholars have examined such recurrent themes and concerns in Barnes’s work as memory, art, love, longing, death, or Englishness. They have also probed his self-reflexive questioning relating to the evasiveness of truth, the irretrievability of the past, the construction of national identity‚ and the relationship between fact and fiction.

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The Archetypal Analysis of Tomorrow by Graham Swift

Linguistics and Literature Review ◽

10.32350/llr.42.01 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 04 (02) ◽

pp. 01-10

Author(s):

Afraz Jabeen ◽

◽

Umme Habiba ◽

Keyword(s):

Graham Swift ◽

Archetypal Analysis

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Discrepant Solace

10.1093/oso/9780198789758.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

David James

Keyword(s):

Literary History ◽

Doris Lessing ◽

Kazuo Ishiguro ◽

Joan Didion ◽

Julian Barnes ◽

Ethical Implications ◽

History Of ◽

Late Twentieth ◽

Ian Mcewan ◽

Affective Meanings

Consolation has always played an uncomfortable part in the literary history of loss. But in recent decades its affective meanings and ethical implications have been recast by narratives that appear to foil solace altogether. Illuminating this striking archive, Discrepant Solace considers writers who engage with consolation not as an aesthetic salve but as an enduring problematic for late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and memoir. Making close readings of emotion crucial to understanding literature’s work in the precarious present, David James examines writers who are rarely considered in conversation, including Sonali Deraniyagala, Colson Whitehead, Cormac McCarthy, W.G. Sebald, Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Julian Barnes, Helen Macdonald, Ian McEwan, Colm Tóibín, Kazuo Ishiguro, Denise Riley, and David Grossman. These figures overturn critical suppositions about consolation’s kinship with ideological complaisance or dubious distraction, producing unsettling perceptions of solace that shape the formal and political contours of their writing.

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ALONE: KAZUO ISHIGURO AND THE PROBLEM OF MUSICAL EMPATHY

The Yale Review ◽

10.1353/tyr.2012.0028 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 100 (2) ◽

pp. 78-98

Author(s):

MARK MAZULLO

Keyword(s):

Kazuo Ishiguro

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ALONE: KAZUO ISHIGURO AND THE PROBLEM OF MUSICAL EMPATHY

The Yale Review ◽

10.1111/j.1467-9736.2012.00786.x ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 100 (2) ◽

pp. 78-98

Author(s):

MARK MAZULLO

Keyword(s):

Kazuo Ishiguro

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Violence, Memory, and History: Geoffrey of Monmouth and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant

The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry ◽

10.1017/pli.2021.17 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 8 (3) ◽

pp. 323-344

Author(s):

Jonathan Brent

Keyword(s):

Middle Ages ◽

Geoffrey Of Monmouth ◽

King Arthur ◽

The Novel ◽

Kazuo Ishiguro ◽

History Of ◽

The Creation

Kazuo Ishiguro has suggested that his work of medieval fantasy, The Buried Giant (2015), draws on a “quasi-historical” King Arthur, in contrast to the Arthur of legend. This article reads Ishiguro’s novel against the medieval work that codified the notion of an historical King Arthur, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1139). Geoffrey’s History offered a largely fictive account of the British past that became the most successful historiographical phenomenon of the English Middle Ages. The Buried Giant offers an interrogation of memory that calls such “useful” constructions of history into question. The novel deploys material deriving from Geoffrey’s work while laying bear its methodology; the two texts speak to each other in ways sometimes complementary, sometimes deconstructive. That Ishiguro’s critique can be applied to Geoffrey’s History points to recurrent strategies of history-making, past and present, whereby violence serves as a mechanism for the creation of historical form.

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