REVISITING GENTLEMANLINESS IN 20TH CENTURY BRITAIN: KAZUO ISHIGURO’S THE REMAINS OF THE DAY

Abstract

New Historicism is a literary approach that came into prominence in the 1980s owing to Stephen Greenblatt’s studies based on Renaissance works. Greenblatt treats a literary text as a product of the social and political setting from which it emerges. Conducting his studies primarily on Shakespeare’s plays, the author illustrates how a literary text is affected by the interrelationship between history and literature. The new historicist approach shows that any literary text is shaped not only by the socio-political context of the author but is also largely determined by the critic’s response to it. Accordingly, such a viewpoint affects the reader’s conventional perception of time and history. The purpose of the present study is to perform a new historicist reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) with a particular focus on the representation of the concept of gentlemanliness to question the validity of its conventional perception. Given the theoretical framework, the study employs such concepts as self-fashioning, representation, persona, time, and history. The novel is based on the reminiscences of a former butler, Stevens, who has devoted his entire life to the service of an English gentleman and owner of a spectacular mansion near Oxford. Never being outside the boundaries of the estate and unaware of the rapid changes in the world, Stevens is determined to live by the conventional principles of gentlemanliness characterized by such values as dignity, loyalty, and modesty. The research argues that the perception of gentlemanliness has changed over the decades due to the subversive force of time undermining its validity in 20th-century Britain. Hence, a new historicist approach to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day focuses on the impact of various socio-political contexts on the conventional understanding of gentlemanliness.