'For Ceridwen Dovey, J.M. Coetzee ‘has always been there, an unseen but strongly felt presence in our small family drama’. As a child, she observed with fascination her mother’s immersion in Coetzee’s writing as she worked on what would become the first critical study of his early novels.
'Even now, as a writer herself, Ceridwen’s relationship with Coetzee’s books is still mediated by her mother’s readings of them: to get to him, she must first step through her mother’s formidable mind. With tenderness and insight, Dovey draws on this personal history to explore the Nobel Prize-winner’s work – how his books ‘do theory’ on themselves – while also tracing the intellectual heritage that has been passed from mother to daughter.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Dedication: For T.J.M.D.
'Ceridwen Dovey’s new estimation of J.M. Coetzee is a personal account. It reflects on the influence of Coetzee’s writings on Dovey’s own work, as well as her mother, Teresa Dovey. The latter is the author of the first critical study of Coetzee’s novels, The Novels of J.M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories (1988).' (Introduction)
'An examination of the work of J.M. Coetzee and his influence on one writer's' family.
'‘We think back through our mothers,’ writes Virginia Woolf (twice) in A Room of One’s Own. At first, she seems to be suggesting that women artists can only derive inspiration from women who precede them: ‘It is useless to go to the great men writers for help … the weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind are too unlike her own.’' (Introduction)
'Of all the titles in Black Inc’s Writers on Writers series, Ceridwen Dovey’s essay on J. M. Coetzee arrives with the most intellectual excitement, as well as the greatest anticipatory unease. This is because Coetzee – two-time winner of the Booker Prize, recipient of the Nobel, the most august literary figure to hold an Australian passport since the death of Patrick White – is also notoriously cool, aloof and reticent about the meaning and nature of his work. How to connect with such a man?' (Introduction)
'Of all the titles in Black Inc’s Writers on Writers series, Ceridwen Dovey’s essay on J. M. Coetzee arrives with the most intellectual excitement, as well as the greatest anticipatory unease. This is because Coetzee – two-time winner of the Booker Prize, recipient of the Nobel, the most august literary figure to hold an Australian passport since the death of Patrick White – is also notoriously cool, aloof and reticent about the meaning and nature of his work. How to connect with such a man?' (Introduction)
'Ceridwen Dovey’s new estimation of J.M. Coetzee is a personal account. It reflects on the influence of Coetzee’s writings on Dovey’s own work, as well as her mother, Teresa Dovey. The latter is the author of the first critical study of Coetzee’s novels, The Novels of J.M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories (1988).' (Introduction)
'An examination of the work of J.M. Coetzee and his influence on one writer's' family.
'‘We think back through our mothers,’ writes Virginia Woolf (twice) in A Room of One’s Own. At first, she seems to be suggesting that women artists can only derive inspiration from women who precede them: ‘It is useless to go to the great men writers for help … the weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind are too unlike her own.’' (Introduction)
