New essays providing critical views of Coetzee's major works for the
scholar and the general reader.
J. M. Coetzee is perhaps the most critically acclaimed bestselling
author of imaginative fiction writing in English today. He received the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and is the first writer to have been
awarded two BookerPrizes. The present volume makes critical views of
this important writer accessible to the general reader as well as the
scholar, discussing Coetzee's main works in chronological order and
introducing the dominant themes in the academic discussion of his
oeuvre.
The volume highlights Coetzee's exceptionally nuanced approach to
writing as both an exacting craft and a challenging moral-ethical
undertaking. It discusses Coetzee's complex relation to apartheid and
post-apartheid South Africa, the land of his birth, and evaluates his
complicated responses to the literary canon. Coetzee emerges as both a
modernist and a highly self-aware postmodernist - a champion of the
truths of aliterary enterprise conducted unrelentingly in the mode of
self-confession.
Contributors: Chris Ackerley, Derek Attridge, Carrol Clarkson, Simone
Drichel, Johan Geertsema, David James, Michelle Kelly, Sue Kossew,
MikeMarais, James Meffan, Tim Mehigan, Chris Prentice, Engelhard Weigl,
Kim L. Worthington.
Tim Mehigan is Professor of Languages in the Department of Languages and
Cultures at the University of Otago, New Zealand and Honorary Professor
in the Department of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies at the
University of Queensland, Australia.
