Kazuo Ishiguro s The Remains of the Day as Historiographic Metafiction

The postmodern idea of history repudiates the traditional notion that it corresponds faithfully to reality. Linda Hutcheon, the Canadian postmodern theorist, has tackled the problematized relationship between history and fiction in what she has labeled Historiographic metafiction. Historiographic metafiction includes those postmodern works, usually popular novels, which are highly self-reflexive and rely heavily on historical reconceptualization that challenges the boundry between story and history to question the objectivity of history. In historiographic metafiction, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and parody are deployed to challenge the traditional norms of writing and ultimately foregrounds the fictionality of history. In this paper, Kazuo Ishiguro s The Remains of the Day (1990) was studied based on Linda Hutcheon theories on historiographic metafiction and it showed that Ishiguro by the use of parody, intertextuality,... tried to yield new ways of representing reality, especially the historical events that happened before, during, and aftermath of the Second World War in England. Accordingly,this research presented that The Remains of the Day is a historiographic metafiction.

Keywords:

Historiographic metafiction , parody , intertextuality , history , Linda Hutcheon.