Representing a wide range of critical and theoretical perspectives, this volume seeks to align the South African dimension of Coetzee's writing with his "late modernist" aesthetic. It includes essays exploring the relationship between Coetzee's novels and his work on linguistics; and, by paying particular attention to the novelist's more recent fictional experiments, the collection points towards a narrato-political and linguistic reassessment of the Coetzee canon.

Graham Bradshaw is Honorary Professor of English and Fine Arts at the University of Queensland, Australia; and Michael Neill is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Chapter 1 Introduction After Disgrace: Lord and Lady Chandos in Cape Town and Adelaide, Graham Bradshaw; Chapter 1a Coetzee's Artists; Coetzee's Art, Derek Attridge; Chapter 2 Responses to Space and Spaces of Response in J.M. Coetzee, Carrol Clarkson; Chapter 3 Coetzee on Film, Lindiwe Dovey, Teresa Dovey; Chapter 4 The Language of the Heart: Confession, Metaphor and Grace in J.M. Coetzee's Age of Iron, Michael Neill; Chapter 5 Disgrace as an Uncanny Revision of Gordimer's None to Accompany Me, Lars Engle; Chapter 6 Scenes from a dry imagination: Disgrace and Embarrassment, Myrtle Hooper; Chapter 7 David Lurie's Learning and the Meaning of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Laurence Wright; Chapter 8 J.M. Coetzee and South Africa: Thoughts on the Social Life of Fiction, David Attwell; Chapter 9 The true words at last from the mind in ruins: J.M. Coetzee and Realism, Jonathan Lamb; Chapter 10 Pity and Autonomy: Coetzee, Costello and Conrad, Graham Bradshaw; Chapter 11 Slow Man and the Real: A Lesson in Reading and Writing, Zoë Wicomb; Chapter 12 Close Encounters: The Author and the Character in Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man and Diary of a Bad Year, Barbara Dancygier;