J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of the Novel

This is the first book that reads Coetzee's novels in light of research into his archive of manuscripts and drafts.

John Bolin (Author)

9781009179645, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 June 2023

290 pages
23.6 x 15.8 x 2.1 cm, 0.51 kg

J. M. Coetzee is widely recognized as one of the most important writers working in English. As a South African (now Australian) novelist composing his best-known works in the latter third of the twentieth century, Coetzee has understandably often been read through the lenses of postcolonial theory and post-war ethics. Yet his reception is entering a new phase bolstered by thousands of pages of new and unpublished empirical evidence housed at the J. M. Coetzee archive at The Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas, Austin). This material provokes a re-reading of Coetzee's project even as it uncovers keys to his process of formal experimentation and compositional evolution up to and including Disgrace (1999). Following Coetzee's false starts, his confrontation of narrative impasses, and his shifting deployment of source materials, J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of the Novel provides a new series of detailed snapshots of one of the world's most celebrated authors.

1. 'The Africa within': Dusklands, Satire, and Technologized Man
2. 'The Congeries that I Bless with the Name of Evil': In the Heart of the Country's Sadian Permutations
3. 'A Question without an Answer': Bafflement and the Surreal in Waiting for the Barbarians
4. 'A New Kind of Man': Idiocy, Idleness, and Sovereignty in Life & Times of Michael K
5. 'The Power of Blackness': Foe and the End of the Novel
6. A Secular 'State of Grace'?: Age of Iron, Angelhood, and the Heterogeneous
7. 'No Moral Defense': The Master of Petersburg's Escalations
8. 'Subjugation, Execution, then Devouring': Clarissa, Animals, and Lucy's Final Word in Disgrace.

Subject Areas: Social & political philosophy [HPS], Ethics & moral philosophy [HPQ], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: post-colonial literature [DSBH5], Literary theory [DSA]