J. M. Coetzee's Politics of Life and Late Modernism in the Contemporary Novel
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20th Century literature
A01=Marc Farrant
Author_Marc Farrant
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contemporary literature
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J.M. Coetzee
late modernism
politics of life
Samuel Beckett
Product details
- ISBN 9781399507790
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 31 Dec 2025
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Surveying the full breadth of J. M. Coetzee's career as both academic and novelist, this book argues for the necessity of rethinking his profound indebtedness to literary modernism in terms of a politics of life. Isolating a particular strain of late modernism, epitomised by Kafka and Beckett, Farrant claims that Coetzee's writings consistently demonstrate an agonistic engagement with the concept of life that involves an entanglement of politics and ethics, which supersedes the singular theoretical frameworks often applied to Coetzee, such as postcolonialism, posthumanism and animal studies. Running throughout his engagement with questions of modernity and colonialism, storytelling and life writing, human and non-human life, religion and post-Enlightenment subjectivity, Coetzee's politics of life yield a new literary cosmopolitanism for the twenty-first century; a powerful commentary on our interrelatedness that emphasises finitude and contingency as fundamental to the way we live together.
Marc Farrant is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Amsterdam.
