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'This book argues that the significance of Coetzee's complex and finely-nuanced fiction lies in the acuity with which it both explores and develops the tradition of the novel - ranging from Cervantes, Defoe, and Richardson, to Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Becket - as part of a sustained attempt to rethink the relationship between writing and politics.' Source: Libraries Australia.
Notes
Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
* Contents derived from the Oxford,Oxfordshire,
c
England,
c
c
United Kingdom (UK),
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Western Europe,Europe,:Oxford University Press,2010 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
'This concluding chapter considers Coetzee's Australian fiction in relation to a longstanding tradition of cultural criticism directed at the moral and political condition of modernity. It has recently been argued that this tradition, for all its many differences of emphasis, has as its shared characteristic the deployment of a ‘cultural principle’ that displaces politics and itself lays claim to the role of social authority: this chapter sets Coetzee in the context of the most important new thinking about the tradition of cultural criticism, making special reference to the recent debate between Stefan Collini and Francis Mulhern. It shows that Coetzee sustainedly tries to refuse the moral and political simplifications that at times have characterized this tradition—allusion is made in particular to the work of Benda, Arnold, Nietzsche, and T. S. Eliot—and that his fiction opens up a line of cultural criticism that more subtly navigates the complex terrain of political modernity.' Source: Patrick Hayes.
