The Remains of the Day: Genre 1 key example

Ishiguro captures the political complexities and uncertainties of this time period well. He also describes a quite specific class of Britons: the aristocracy, who have since come to exercise much less power over the British government. As would have been true for actual Britons in the interwar and post-war periods, every character's life is entangled in at least one of the world wars. For instance, Stevens has a brother who died during World War I. Attentive readers should keep an eye out for casual or brief references to both of these wars in the novel.

The novel also occupies a tenuous place between realism and the Romantic. Although they are today often positioned as opposites, realism and Romanticism can in fact share many attributes. Nothing fantastical or unrealistic occurs in The Remains of the Day, and some readers might argue that the characters' ruined hopes and regrets reflect real life more accurately than a "happy ending" would. At the same time, the beautiful English landscapes, kind strangers, and philosophical meanderings in the novel align it with mainstays of literary Romanticism, such as the poetry of William Wordsworth. It's also worth noting that Wordsworth, like Ishiguro in this novel, wrote extensively about landscapes and common Britons. The Remains of the Day might be called Romantic realism: it doesn't have the grittiness, violence, or despair of some realist novels, but it nevertheless attempts to accurately reflect real life in an artful and morally instructive way, without ever becoming didactic.