A New Historicist Approach to Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans

Abstract

New Historicism, flourishing in the 1980s as a "new" contemporary literary approach, proposes new viewpoints to the understanding of history and challenges the conventional understanding of history by pointing out the private histories. New Historicism deals with the representations of history rather than the history itself since it believes that there is not one history but multiple histories. The purpose of this article is to analyze the representation of history in Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans from the New Historicist viewpoint by focusing on the concepts of time, memory and narrative technique, hence to reveal how history is narrated in subjective multiple ways and how personal histories and public histories are intermingled.