A Companion to the Works of J. M. Coetzee

by Mehigan, Tim

• ISBN13: 9781571135070
• ISBN10: 1571135073
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-12-08
• Publisher: Camden House

Summary

J. M. Coetzee is perhaps the most critically acclaimed bestselling author of fiction writing in English today. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and is the first writer to have been awarded two Booker Prizes. The present volume of new essays makes critical views of this most challenging of writers accessible to the general reader as well as the scholar. It discusses Coetzee's main works in chronological order and introduces the dominant themes in the academic discussion of his oeuvre. A second intention also animates the volume. Since Coetzee's move from his native South Africa to Australia in 2002, it has become possible to see his writing in two distinct phases: one stretching from his first novel, Dusklands (1974), to Disgrace (1999), the pinnacle of the "South African" phase, and another beginning with Elizabeth Costello (2003) and extending to the most recent novel, Diary of a Bad Year (2007), in an "Australian" phase. The transition between the two phases is realized in Coetzee's fictionalized memoirs, commencing with Boyhood (1997), continuing with Youth (2002), and concluding with Summertime (2009). This volume is the first to undertake a comprehensive critical evaluation of these two phases in Coetzee's career. Contributors: Chris Ackerley, Carrol Clarkson, Simone Drichel, Johan Geertsema, David James, Michelle Kelly, Sue Kossew, Mike Marais, James Meffan, Tim Mehigan, Chris Prentice, Engelhard Weigl, Kim L. Worthington. Tim Mehigan is Professor of German and Head of the Department of Languages and Cultures at the University of Otago, New Zealand.