J. M. Coetzee – novelist, essayist, public intellectual, and Nobel Laureate in Literature (2003) – is widely recognized as one of the towering literary figures of the last half century. With chapters written by leading and emerging scholars from across the world, The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee offers the most comprehensive available exploration of the variety, range and significance of his work.
The volume covers a wealth of topics, including:
· The full span of Coetzee’s work from his poetry to his essays and major fiction, including Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace and the Jesus novels · Biographical details and archival approaches · Coetzee’s sources and influences, including engagements with Modernism, South African, Australian, Russian and Latin American literatures · Interdisciplinary perspectives, including on visual cultures, music, philosophy, computational systems and translation.
The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee provides indispensable scholarly perspectives, covers emerging debates and maps the future direction of Coetzee studies.
Part One: Life, Institutions, Reception 1. On the idea of a handbook to the works of J. M. Coetzee: ‘Preposterous [?]’ Andrew van der Vlies and Lucy Valerie Graham 2. Life & times of J. M. Coetzee Jane Poyner 3. Autobiographies/autrebiographies/biographies Alexandra Effe 4. J. M. Coetzee and his publishers Andrea Thorpe Part Two: Early Coetzee 5. Coetzee’s poetry Jarad Zimbler 6. Dusklands Rita Barnard 7. In the Heart of the Country Ian Glenn 8. Waiting for the Barbarians Jennifer Wenzel 9. Life & Times of Michael K Eckard Smuts Part Three: Late- and post-apartheid Coetzee 10. Foe Patrick Flanery 11. Age of Iron Katherine Hallemeier 12. The Master of Petersburg Derek Attridge 13. Disgrace Chris Holmes 14. J. M. Coetzee’s apartheid-era criticism Xiaoran Hu Part Four: Late-style Coetzee 15. The Costello project Andrew van der Vlies 16. Diary of a Bad Year Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice 17. The Jesus novels Timothy Bewes 18. Later criticism and correspondence Nick Mulgrew Part Five: Style, Form, Ideas 19. Coetzee’s style Carrol Clarkson 20. Coetzee, religion and philosophy Alice Brittan 21. Coetzee, gender and sexuality Laura Wright 22. Coetzee and the nonhuman Daniel Williams 23. Coetzee, computers and binary thinking Rebecca Roach 24. Coetzee’s humour Huw Marsh 25. Education and the novels of J. M. Coetzee Aparna Mishra Tarc Part Six: Contexts, Intertexts, Influence 26. Coetzee and the history of the novel Andrew Dean 27. Coetzee’s South Africans Jan Steyn 28. Coetzee’s modernists Paul Sheehan 29. Coetzee’s Mitteleuropa and Austro-Hungary Russell Samolsky 30. Coetzee, Israel, Palestine Louise Bethlehem, Dalia Abu-Sbitan and Shir Dannon 31. Coetzee’s Russians Jeanne-Marie Jackson 32. Coetzee’s Latin America Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra 33. Coetzee’s Australians Michelle Cahill Part Seven: Intermediation, adaptation, translation 34. Coetzee and photography Hermann Wittenberg 35. Coetzee and the visual arts Sean O’Toole 36. J. M. Coetzee and the work of music Graham K. Riach 37. Adapting Coetzee for the stage and screen Ed Charlton 38. Coetzee and translation Jan Wilm Index
Andrew van der Vlies is Professor in the Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film at the University of Adelaide, Australia. and Extraordinary Professor at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. His previous books include Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing (2017), South African Textual Cultures (2007), and, as editor or co-editor, Print, Text, and Book Cultures in South Africa (2012), Zoë Wicomb's Race, Nation, Translation: South African Essays (2018), and South African Writing in Transition (2019). Lucy Valerie Graham is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
Reviews for The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee
This book offers an extraordinary and exciting array of information, ideas, insights, as well as assessments and unexpected contexts, about Coetzee’s life and works. Its comprehensiveness is really quite remarkable. The perceptive, thoughtful essays quickly challenged me into thinking afresh and anew—I found myself immediately propelled back to Coetzee’s books on my shelves and starting to reread them. Every admirer of Coetzee will want to have this book by their side. * Robert J.C. Young, Professor of English, New York University, USA * Like many innovative writers, J. M. Coetzee has always been wary of what he once called the critic’s ‘games handbook.’ Thankfully, The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee heeds this caution. Assembling an impressive array of established and emergent critics, this welcome, even game-changing collection opens Coetzee’s astonishing oeuvre for a new generation of readers in myriad productive ways * Peter D. McDonald, Professor of English and Related Literature, University of Oxford, UK *
