In the Conclusion, Forming Afro-Chinese Worlds, I deepen my discussion of aesthetics by focusing explicitly on the literary forms that writers use to imagine Afro-Chinese worlds. I make one last conceptual intervention by theorizing alluvial form (how a narrative texturizes the matrix of space and time through water and sediment, reconfiguring “worldliness”) with Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea (2019). This novel approaches the topic of Africa–China relations by fictionalizing the real-life story of a Kenyan woman found to have Chinese DNA. Through short, proleptic bursts that mimic waves rolling into shore, the novel reanimates the Indian Ocean as the primary site of exchange between the Swahili coast and southern China. The text counters the dehumanizing discourse surrounding Africa–China relations, using literary form anchored in the sociocultural histories of East Africa and so representing China in and on its own terms. I end by considering the fractal form of history, or the underlying process of creolization that I have teased out of how each chapter conceptualizes the alluvial.

This chapter considers the place of Ishiguro’s work within the novel tradition. It traces Ishiguro’s dialogue with the novel form, as this extends from Artist of the Floating World to Klara and the Sun, in order to examine the means by which he adapts the tradition to his own ends. The chapter begins and concludes with a reading of Klara and the Sun that focuses on the role of imitation. How far can Klara, the ‘artificial friend’, be regarded as a copy of an existing form of life, and how far does she manifest a new mode of being? And how does Ishiguro adapt the apparatuses of the novel in order to explore the difference, between the imitation of an existing life and the creation, in prose, of an unprecedented one, a fictional life without a model in the world?

This chapter highlights translation as both formally and thematically at the very core of Kazuo Ishiguro’s writing – as its origin, strategy, and target. Its first part considers the ways in which the author’s engagement with the two cultures at the heart of his own experience helped shape a translational realism and a poetics of originary translatedness that are central to his style and that comment implicitly on their own constructedness as well as on our narrative and critical assumptions. The chapter then turns to a focus on Ishiguro’s self-consciously ‘translated’ narrative voices training us in navigating their liminalities, thus prompting reflection, on various levels, on the limits of knowing. Ultimately, the chapter argues that Ishiguro’s poetics of translation – or more precisely the liminalities of its subtly self-reflexive translational realism and voice – draws attention to itself as such, thereby extending the novels’ concerns to an ethics of reading that also models an ethics for reading world literature.

Ishiguro’s protagonists are notable for their resolution. It is precisely this quality that leads characters such as Ono in An Artist of the Floating World, Stevens in Remains of the Day, Christopher Banks in When We Were Orphans, and Kathy H in Never Let Me Go to make life-defining but ethically dubious decisions. In this sense, irresolution can be seen, paradoxically and not unproblematically, as a key Ishigurian virtue. Indeed, irresolution inheres in Ishiguro’s novels in terms of narrative form as well as ethics and theme: rather than offering epiphany, consolation, redemption, or any final hermeneutic closure or disclosure, the novels are insistent, resolute in their tendency towards thematic, ethical, and structural irresolution. At the same time, however, the desire for resolution is shown to be an understandable one, and to underlie the characters’ efforts to make meaning from the worlds and situations in which they find themselves.

The analogy between music and language is both problematic and essential for any rich understanding of musical Romanticism. Few commentators today would accept that music functions as a language; but the idea that music has poetic, literary, or dramatic substance is foundational to Romantic aesthetics and find expression in music as stylistically disparate as Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Schumann’s Papillons. This chapter explores the musical languages of Romanticism, focusing both on the melodic, harmonic, and formal dimensions of musical practice and on the literary and linguistic labour they perform. It explores music from Beethoven and Field at the turn of the nineteenth century to Brahms and Mussorgsky at the century’s end, paying attention to the contrasted thematic cultures that Beethoven and Field instantiate, the harmonic innovations of Schubert, Liszt, Brahms, and Mussorgsky, and the intersections of form and narrative in Schumann’s Second Symphony.

This chapter examines Coetzee’s creative and scholarly engagements with literary style, beginning with his earliest novel Dusklands and moving across his corpus to track his complexly evolving use of style’s emotional, ethical, and political affordances. Apparently distinct, even diverging impulses – one embracing grace and euphony, the other committing to verbal thrift and minimalism – coalesce across Coetzee’s career, soliciting complicated affective responses from his readers to the inflections and connotations of novelistic discourse. It is critically tempting see Coetzee as a kind of stern gatekeeper of formal restraint: a writer who shuns the consolations of style and who forestalls the pleasures his readers might take in elegantly wrought language, by investing instead in a kind of syntactic austerity and bareness. In practice, however, his fiction doesn’t always behave in this manner, as beautifully paced, rhetorically supple sequences from Age of Iron, Disgrace, and The Schooldays of Jesus attest.