Overview

This book explores the nexus between religion and literature in J. M. Coetzee’s writings, as they relate to his readings of key Christian thinkers and ideas. In the process, it examines Coetzee’s extensive efforts at revising and reimagining a variety of Christian legacies across his full corpus. Inspired by Coetzee's more overt, recent engagement with Christianity, this book excavates the prior subterranean developments across his early and middle works. It provides the most comprehensive study to date of his rewriting of Christian mores and rhetoric from eighteenth-century English novels; his frequent revisiting of the Christian author Fyodor Dostoevsky; and his pervasive re-imagining of traditional Christian subjects such as grace, redemption, and Jesus. Informed by original archival material, this book illuminates Coetzee’s writing process, especially from Dusklands to the Jesus trilogy. It provides a sustained exploration of the contexts from which his abundance of Christian allusions and concepts were drawn, how they change in his hands, and how they effect changes in the “new” contexts of his innovative novels.

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9781350500235

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Reviews

Alicia Broggi’s impressive J. M. Coetzee and Christianity reflects in thoughtful and sustained ways on the author’s engagement across his career with the legacies of Christian thought, including concepts of immortality, charity, redemption, and grace. Informed by extensive and sensitive explorations in the Coetzee archive, Broggi’s book is distinguished by a breath-taking mix of clarity and rigour. This is a bold and important study bringing readers face-to-face with the ‘ultimate questions’ that Coetzee’s work raises * Professor Elleke Boehmer, Oxford University, UK *

Alicia Broggi’s impressive J. M. Coetzee and Christianity reflects in thoughtful and sustained ways on the author’s engagement across his career with the legacies of Christian thought, including concepts of immortality, charity, redemption, and grace. Informed by extensive and sensitive explorations in the Coetzee archive, Broggi’s book is distinguished by a breath-taking mix of clarity and rigour. This is a bold and important study bringing readers face-to-face with the ‘ultimate questions’ that Coetzee’s work raises * Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, Oxford University, UK *

Author Information

Alicia Broggi is a freelance writer. She has travelled extensively, researching the intersections of religion and literature in Africa, Europe, the US, and Asia. She has two degrees in theology, as well as a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Edinburgh, UK, and a doctorate in English literature from the University of Oxford, UK.

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