'In the early eighteenth century, a woman finds herself set adrift from a mutinous ship and cast ashore on a remote desert island. There she finds shelter with its only other inhabitants: a man named Cruso and his tongueless slave Friday. In time, she builds a life for herself as Cruso's companion and, eventually, his lover.' (Source: Libraries Australia)
Editions and translations have been updated for Foe by Eilish Copelin as part of a Semester 2, 2013 scholar's internship. The selection and inclusion of these editions and translations was based on their availability through Australian libraries, namely through the search facilities of Libraries Australia and Trove (National Library of Australia).
Given the international popularity of Coetzee's work, however, this record is not yet comprehensive. Editions and translations not widely available in Australia may not have been indexed. Furthermore, due to the enormous breadth of critical material on Coetzee's work, indexing of secondary sources is also not complete.
'For all the effort and artifice that writers put into affixing reality-testifying stability and solidity to their dramatis personae, it is in the nature of character to drift. Indeed, in a brutally abbreviated history of English literature, drift might be said to be the main characteristic of the story of “Character”, were character to be personified as a character. From Character’s origins as a broadly allegorical figure representing either vice or virtue in the epic poems and morality plays of the Middle Ages, via the lively realism and relative individualism conferred upon it by Chaucer, to the humanism of the Renaissance, where, in the hands of Shakespeare, it blossoms into a being of depth and complexity. Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear are not mere representations of ideas but are multi-faceted individuals with distinct personalities, their inner conflicts and moral dilemmas reflecting the human condition. From there, Character drifts into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where the rise of the novel gives it a new stage on which to perform. In the works of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, it becomes even more nuanced and detailed, mirroring the intricacies of social manners and the dynamics of an evolving society. Here, Character is no longer just a vehicle for a plot but an entity that could drive the story forward through its choices, changes, and growth. The twentieth century brings modernism, which sees Character undergoing yet another transformation. Now, Character often reflects the fragmented nature of modern existence, as seen in the works of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; and, influenced by new thinking about psychology and the emergence of the practice and theory of psychoanalysis, Character is cast adrift on streams of consciousness, exploring the richly complex inner workings of the mind. With the advent of postmodernism, Character turns self-saboteur, militating against its own histories of verisimilitude and its drive towards ever-greater psychological authenticity. It plays knowingly both with the expectations of the credulous reader and with the conventions of literary writing, laying bare the workings of writerly artifice and blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction. Today, the character of Character is legion, traversing a diverse landscape, embodying a multitude of experiences, identities, and realities. And it has drifted beyond the confines of the printed page to new and familiar storyworlds in other media in an expansive post-literary field (on the latter point, see Callus and Corby, v).' (Introduction)
'In the remarks that preface his 2003 Nobel Lecture, entitled ‘He and His Man’ (worth watching on YouTube for the dry comedy of the delivery alone), J. M. Coetzee speaks of reading The Strange and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe when he was ‘eight or nine’. Presumably this was an abridged children’s version of the kind many of us read at that age. He would not have been alone when he fell in love with this ‘desert island that became a kingdom’, or when Crusoe became ‘a figure in my imagination’. Less predictable, perhaps, was his bewilderment at the claim in his Children’s Encyclopaedia that the author of the book was someone called Daniel Defoe. ‘This made no sense,’ he continues, ‘because it said on the first page of Robinson Crusoe that Robinson Crusoe told the story himself.’(Introduction)'
'The end of a novel is the site of particular epistemic privilege. If the form is governed by a biographical master plot, the “meaning of the life,” as Benjamin has it, is “revealed only in [the] death” that is the plot's narrative limit—and beyond this limit “the novelist . . . cannot hope to take the smallest step.” Such a limit is seemingly crossed in one of the most difficult and quite possibly the strangest of passages in J. M. Coetzee's fiction: the ending of Foe. This book's self-conscious re-presentation of the origins of the English novel (and of Defoe's inauguration of the genre's biographical pattern) culminates in a surreal encounter that Coetzee's readers have claimed limns a restorative justice or a utopic futurity. But these interpretations ignore the text's insistence on a silence that overwhelms language, the specter of mass death, and a summative darkness that attend upon this place. What might it mean, in fact, for Foe's ending to cross the Novel's thresholds only to stage a total “blackout” of the realist novel's meaning-producing mechanism and the story of individual experience the genre has valorized? This article draws on Coetzee's unpublished notebooks and the Foe ur-text to argue that the novel proposes an impossible crossing, whereby key strategies we have used to value the genre—its capacity to summon countervoices or to invoke an ethical response to alterity—are shadowed by a radical question about the limits of our readerly attention.' (Publication abstract)
'In the remarks that preface his 2003 Nobel Lecture, entitled ‘He and His Man’ (worth watching on YouTube for the dry comedy of the delivery alone), J. M. Coetzee speaks of reading The Strange and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe when he was ‘eight or nine’. Presumably this was an abridged children’s version of the kind many of us read at that age. He would not have been alone when he fell in love with this ‘desert island that became a kingdom’, or when Crusoe became ‘a figure in my imagination’. Less predictable, perhaps, was his bewilderment at the claim in his Children’s Encyclopaedia that the author of the book was someone called Daniel Defoe. ‘This made no sense,’ he continues, ‘because it said on the first page of Robinson Crusoe that Robinson Crusoe told the story himself.’(Introduction)'
'Translating is not only an exercise in the restoration of meaning. The translator’s true challenge lies in restoring meaning while preserving the way in which that meaning is expressed, because style is what is unique to a text. While working on a book, translators find many obstacles along their path in the form of innate tendencies, that are very difficult to resist and that deform and manipulate the stylistic features of the text. Working on Coetzee’s novels, this is particularly true when the narrator telling the story is a woman, due to specific aspects of translating gender. In my article I will explore some of the issues I faced when I translated into Italian two of Coetzee’s novels, In the Heart of the Country (1978) and Foe (1986). On one side, in telling Magda’s and Susan’s stories in Italian, the translator has to resist the temptation to rationalise the narrator’s language or to fill in the silence pervading the two novels just to make the text more coherent. And on the other side, she has to find a suitable language with regard to both diction and syntax, and to look for a way to address the question of what Magda calls ‘the pronouns of intimacy’, when the female and the colonised subject are marginalised by patriarchal authority.' (Publication abstract)
