Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
The South African novelist J. M. Coetzee is one of the most highly respected – and most frequently studied – contemporary authors. His novels occupy a special place in South African literature, and in the development of the twentieth- and 21st-century novel more generally. They are widely taught, internationally, on undergraduate modules, and interest amongst postgraduate students is high. He was the first novelist to win the Booker Prize twice (for Life and Times of Michael K in 1983, and Disgrace in 1999), and has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (2003). With the publication of Disgrace Coetzee began to enjoy popular as well as critical acclaim. Nevertheless, he is a difficult writer who engages with complex ideas, and it is the task of this book to explain the significance of Coetzee in an introductory spirit. This is a challenge, because his works can make an instant and impressive impact on readers, who are then sometimes uncertain as to how to understand, or account for that impact.
It is sometimes said that postmodernism arrived in Africa with the publication, in 1974, of Dusklands, Coetzee's first novel (although he is frequently discussed as a ‘late modernist’). Presented as a pair of linked novellas, Dusklands associates its portrayal of eighteenth-century Dutch imperialism in South Africa with an anatomy of the terror that underpins US policy in Vietnam.
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- The Cambridge Introduction to J. M. Coetzee , pp. ix - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009