AustLit

'The novels of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee won him global recognition and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. His work offers substantial pedagogical richness and challenges. Coetzee treats such themes as race, ageing, gender, animal rights, power, violence, colonial history and accountability, the silent or silenced other, sympathy, and forgiveness in an allusive and detached prose that avoids obvious answers or easy ethical reassurance.' (Publication summary)

'Nobel Laureate and the first author to win the Booker Prize twice, J.M. Coetzee is perhaps the world's leading living novelist writing in English. Including an international roster of world leading critics and novelists, and drawing on new research, this innovative book analyses the whole range of Coetzee's work, from his most recent novels through his memoirs and critical writing. It offers a range of perspectives on his relationship with the historical, political, cultural and social context of South Africa. It also contextualises Coetzee's work in relation to his literary influences, colonial and post-colonial history, the Holocaust and colonial genocides, the ‘politics' and meaning of the Nobel prize in South Africa and Coetzee's very public move from South Africa to Australia. Including a major unpublished essay by leading South African novelist André Brink, this book offers the most up-to-date study of Coetzee's work currently available.' (Publisher's summary)

Contains the following chapters: 1. Imperialism and Textuality -- 2. Colonialist Concerns -- 3. The Stirrings of New Nationalism -- 4. Metropolitans and Mimics -- 5. Independence -- 6. Postcolonialism and Beyond.

In this book, Elleke Boehmer looks challengingly at the history of postcolonial writing, how it developed and how it departs from writing in the Empire in the Victorian period. Throughout this literature key themes and images - journeying, loss, the search for community, the arrival of the stranger - are expanded and redefined. Boehmer discusses these with reference to a broad range of texts, from Trollope, Kipling, Orwell, D. H. Lawrence, and Katherine Mansfield, to authors as recent as Ben Okri and Michael Ondaatje, and the Aboriginal Australians Sally Morgan and Mudrooroo.