Table of Contents

Part One: Life, Institutions, Reception

1. On the idea of a handbook to the works of J. M. Coetzee: ‘Preposterous [?]’
Andrew van der Vlies and Lucy Valerie Graham
2. Life & times of J. M. Coetzee
Jane Poyner
3. Autobiographies/autrebiographies/biographies
Alexandra Effe
4. J. M. Coetzee and his publishers
Andrea Thorpe

Part Two: Early Coetzee

5. Coetzee’s poetry
Jarad Zimbler
6. Dusklands
Rita Barnard
7. In the Heart of the Country
Ian Glenn
8. Waiting for the Barbarians
Jennifer Wenzel
9. Life & Times of Michael K
Eckard Smuts

Part Three: Late- and post-apartheid Coetzee

10. Foe
Patrick Flanery
11. Age of Iron
Katherine Hallemeier
12. The Master of Petersburg
Derek Attridge
13. Disgrace
Chris Holmes
14. J. M. Coetzee’s apartheid-era criticism
Xiaoran Hu

Part Four: Late-style Coetzee

15. The Costello project
Andrew van der Vlies
16. Diary of a Bad Year
Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice
17. The Jesus novels
Timothy Bewes
18. Later criticism and correspondence
Nick Mulgrew

Part Five: Style, Form, Ideas

19. Coetzee’s style
Carrol Clarkson
20. Coetzee, religion and philosophy
Alice Brittan
21. Coetzee, gender and sexuality
Laura Wright
22. Coetzee and the nonhuman
Daniel Williams
23. Coetzee, computers and binary thinking
Rebecca Roach
24. Coetzee’s humour
Huw Marsh
25. Education and the novels of J. M. Coetzee
Aparna Mishra Tarc

Part Six: Contexts, Intertexts, Influence

26. Coetzee and the history of the novel
Andrew Dean
27. Coetzee’s South Africans
Jan Steyn
28. Coetzee’s modernists
Paul Sheehan
29. Coetzee’s Mitteleuropa and Austro-Hungary
Russell Samolsky
30. Coetzee, Israel, Palestine
Louise Bethlehem, Dalia Abu-Sbitan and Shir Dannon
31. Coetzee’s Russians
Jeanne-Marie Jackson
32. Coetzee’s Latin America
Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra
33. Coetzee’s Australians
Michelle Cahill

Part Seven: Intermediation, adaptation, translation

34. Coetzee and photography
Hermann Wittenberg
35. Coetzee and the visual arts
Sean O’Toole
36. J. M. Coetzee and the work of music
Graham K. Riach
37. Adapting Coetzee for the stage and screen
Ed Charlton
38. Coetzee and translation
Jan Wilm

Index

Promotional Information

A comprehensive exploration of contemporary scholarship on the work of J.M. Coetzee, with chapters by more than 35 leading scholars from across the world.

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.

Reviews

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*