The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee - (Bloomsbury Handbooks) by Lucy Valerie Graham & Andrew Van Der Vlies

Book Synopsis

J. M. Coetzee - novelist, essayist, public intellectual, and Nobel Laureate in Literature (2003) - is widely recognized as one of the towering literary figures of the last half century. With chapters written by leading and emerging scholars from across the world, The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee offers the most comprehensive available exploration of the variety, range and significance of his work.

The volume covers a wealth of topics, including:

- The full span of Coetzee's work from his poetry to his essays and major fiction, including Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace and the Jesus novels
- Biographical details and archival approaches
- Coetzee's sources and influences, including engagements with Modernism, South African, Australian, Russian and Latin American literatures
- Interdisciplinary perspectives, including on visual cultures, music, philosophy, computational systems and translation.

The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee provides indispensable scholarly perspectives, covers emerging debates and maps the future direction of Coetzee studies.

Review Quotes

"The Bloomsbury Handbook to J.M. Coetzee, to my mind, effects such a deepening in informative and often powerful ways. While of primary interest to the specialist, it will be a valuable point of reference for anyone who has been stirred by the reach and depth of Coetzee's writing, and, who, like the boy David and his guardian Simón in the Schooldays of Jesus (2016), attempts to execute new steps and thereby learn to 'dance the universe'." --Australian Book Review

"This book offers an extraordinary and exciting array of information, ideas, insights, as well as assessments and unexpected contexts, about Coetzee's life and works. Its comprehensiveness is really quite remarkable. The perceptive, thoughtful essays quickly challenged me into thinking afresh and anew-I found myself immediately propelled back to Coetzee's books on my shelves and starting to reread them. Every admirer of Coetzee will want to have this book by their side." --Robert J.C. Young, Professor of English, New York University, USA

"Like many innovative writers, J. M. Coetzee has always been wary of what he once called the critic's 'games handbook.' Thankfully, The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee heeds this caution. Assembling an impressive array of established and emergent critics, this welcome, even game-changing collection opens Coetzee's astonishing oeuvre for a new generation of readers in myriad productive ways" --Peter D. McDonald, Professor of English and Related Literature, University of Oxford, UK

About the Author

Andrew van der Vlies is Professor in the Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film at the University of Adelaide, Australia. and Extraordinary Professor at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. His previous books include Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing (2017), South African Textual Cultures (2007), and, as editor or co-editor, Print, Text, and Book Cultures in South Africa (2012), Zoë Wicomb's Race, Nation, Translation: South African Essays (2018), and South African Writing in Transition (2019).

Lucy Valerie Graham is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.