J.M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual

In September 2003 the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, confirming his reputation as one of the most influential writers of our time.

This book addresses the contribution Coetzee has made to contemporary literature, not least for the contentious forays his work makes into South African political discourse and the field of postcolonial studies. Taking the authors ethical writing as its theme, the volume is an important addition to understanding Coetzees fiction and critical thinking. While taking stock of Coetzees singular, modernist response to the apartheid and post-apartheid situations in his early fiction, the volume is the first to engage at length with later works, Disgrace, The Lives of Animals, and Elizabeth Costello. J.M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual explores Coetzees roles as an intellectual and novelist, including his stance on matters of allegory and his evasion of the apartheid censor. The essays collected here, which include an interview with the Nobel laureate, provide new vantages from which to consider Coetzees writing.