AustLit

'J.M. Coetzee is perhaps the most critically acclaimed bestselling author of imaginative fiction writing in English today. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and is the first writer to have been awarded two Booker Prizes. The present volume makes critical views of this important writer accessible to the general reader as well as the scholar, discussing Coetzee's main works in chronological order and introducing the dominant themes in the academic discussion of his oeuvre. It also highlights the author's exceptionally nuanced approach to writing as both an exacting craft and a challenging moral-ethical undertaking. It discusses the author's complex relation to apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, the land of his birth, and evaluates his complicated responses to the literary canon. He emerges as both a modernist and a highly self-aware post modernist, a champion of the truths of a literary enterprise conducted unrelentingly in the mode of self-confession.' (Publisher's summary)