Cirrus@Austlit

'Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee is amongst the most acclaimed and widely studied of contemporary authors. The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Coetzee provides a compelling introduction for new readers, as well as fresh perspectives and provocations for those long familiar with Coetzee's works. All of Coetzee's published novels and autobiographical fictions are discussed at length, and there is extensive treatment of his translations, scholarly books and essays, and volumes of correspondence. Confronting Coetzee's works on the grounds of his practice, the chapters address his craft, his literary relations and horizons, and the relationship between his writings and other arts, disciplines and institutions. Written by an international team of contributors, this Companion offers a comprehensive introduction to this important writer, establishes new avenues of discovery, and explains Coetzee's undiminished ability to challenge and surprise his readers with inventive works of striking power and intensity.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'J. M. Coetzee's early novels confronted readers with a brute reality stripped of human relation and a prose repeatedly described as spare, stark, intense and lyrical. In this book, Jarad Zimbler explores the emergence of a style forged in Coetzee's engagement with the complexities of South African culture and politics. Tracking the development of this style across Coetzee's first eight novels, from Dusklands to Disgrace, Zimbler compares Coetzee's writing with that of South African authors such as Gordimer, Brink and La Guma, whilst re-examining the nature of Coetzee's indebtedness to modernism and postmodernism. In each case, he follows the threads of Coetzee's own writings on stylistics and rhetoric in order to fix on those techniques of language and narrative used to activate a 'politics of style'. In so doing, Zimbler challenges long-held beliefs about Coetzee's oeuvre, and about the ways in which contemporary literatures of the world are to be read and understood.' (Publisher's summary)