J. M. Coetzee and Christianity

This book explores the nexus between religion and literature by examining central developments in J.M. Coetzee’s writings, as they relate to his readings of key Christian thinkers and ideas.

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.