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Understanding Brian W. Shaffer The first critical
survey of the life and
work of the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the
Day 5 x 7, 141 pages |
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Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro, Brian W. Shaffer
provides the first critical survey of the
life and work of the
Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the
Day. One of the most closely
followed British
writers of his generation, the Japanese-born, English-raised and educated Ishiguro is the
author of four critically acclaimed novels: A
Pale View of Hills
(1982, Winifred Holtby Prize of the
Royal Society of
Literature), An Artist of the
Floating World (1986,
Whitbread Book
of the Year
Award), The Remains of the
Day (1988, Booker Prize), and The
Unconsoled (1995, Cheltenham
Prize). Ishiguro's reputation also extends beyond the world of
English-language
readers. His work has
been translated into twenty-seven
foreign languages, and The Remains of the
Day has been
produced as a feature
film that was nominated
for eight Academy Awards.
Shaffer's study reveals Ishiguro's novels to
be intricately crafted, psychologically absorbing, hauntingly
evocative works that betray the
author's grounding not only in the literature
of Japan but also in the great
twentieth-century
British masters-Joseph Conrad, Ford
Madox Ford, E. M. Forster, and James Joyce-as
well as in Freudian psychoanalysis. All
of Ishiguro's novels are shown to
capture first-person narrators in
the intriguing act of revealing-yet also of
attempting to conceal beneath the surface
of their mundane present activities-the alarming significance
and troubling consequences of their past lives.
Conceived of as a companion
to the author's
subtle and complex
fictions, Understanding
Kazuo Ishiguro
examines and clarifies the works of this
critically acclaimed international writer.
Brian W. Shaffer received his B.A. from Washington University and
his Ph.D. from
the University of Iowa. He is
an associate professor of English at Rhodes
College in Memphis, Tennessee, where he teaches twentieth-century British literature and the modern novel. Shaffer is also
the author of The Blinding Torch: Modern British Fiction
and the Discourse
of Civilization and of numerous
articles on the
works of Joseph
Conrad, James
Joyce, Malcolm Lowry, and Virginia
Woolf. "Brian Shaffer's
perceptive and
lucid study persuasively explicates Ishiguro's
novels, while doing justice to his talent and
stature."-Daniel R. Schwarz, Cornell University "Shaffer writes simply and directly without compromising
the complexity of the content."—Choice |
Shaffer,Brian.“Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro“<http://www.sc.edu/uscpress/Sp98/3215.html>
This page updated March
30, 2005 by parkerll@sc.edu
This page copyright © 1997-2005, The Board of Trustees
of the University
of South Carolina
URL: http://www.sc.edu/uscpress/Sp98/3215.html