Description
Book SynopsisIn this convincing and provocative study, Rebecca Suter aims to complicate our understanding of world literature by examining the creative and critical deployment of cultural stereotypes in the early novels of Kazuo Ishiguro.
Trade ReviewThis is an accomplished work, a detailed and generous reading of Ishiguro’s early novels and a needed correction to cultural essentialism that still pervades much of world literature theory. I would be delighted to point my students to Suter's book as they explore Ishiguro and consider the now more complicated question of his relationship with Britain and Japan. It is a pleasure to read and its arguments will be lasting. Convincing and provocative, Two-World Literature exhibits a radically poststructuralist approach to Ishiguro’s novels with its emphasis on the rhetorical, narratological, and transnational aspects of his work. Long before the Nobel literary prize was awarded to him, some critics wondered if Ishiguro was a Japanese novelist who wrote in English or a British novelist who injected Japanese sensibilities into his narratives. Suter attempts to establish him as a writer of world literature, one who transgresses the boundary between East and West.
