Edinburgh Critical Studies in South–South Literary Engagements
Hispanic CoetzeeWorld Literature Beyond the Anglosphere
£90.00
About this book
- Draws on the whole Coetzee corpus in English and Spanish translation, unpublished work and interviews, and new archival material
- Engages with Hispanic literatures figures like Cervantes, Neruda and Borges, showing how they influenced Coetzee’s work
- Demonstrates that throughout his career Coetzee was influenced by Hispanic literatures even as he also promoted it through varied intellectual praxes
- Allows for a Hispanic reading of Coetzee, thus building bridges with the Spanish-language strand in the wider field of world literature
- Shows the distinctiveness of the circulation of world literature in a non-Anglophone global context with significant southern elements
Nobel prize-winner J. M. Coetzee’s Jesus novels (2013–19) are marked by distinctive Spanish-language and Hispanic-literatures elements, which bring forward a long elective affinity. Hispanic Coetzee is the first organic interpretation of Coetzee’s oeuvre from a Hispanic perspective which also affirms that writing from ‘the South’ is central to his work. Developing a combined comparative, Spanish and South American perspective that is new in Coetzee scholarship, Cristóbal Pérez Barra shows that the articulation of four Hispanic worlds progressed from Coetzee’s early writings. These include Coetzee’s Spanish translations and his discovery of the Spanish language, his academic work and Southern Cone travels, and his fiction and non-fiction writing, which converge in a Hispanic reality of the mind with a southern component. Hispanic Coetzee argues that Coetzee can only be properly understood as a writer whose work extends beyond the Anglophone sphere – a proposal which recalibrates our sense of his contribution to world literature.
Reviews
Anyone interested in Coetzee should be grateful for this thorough analysis of his Hispanic influences. Pérez Barra’s study is exhaustive, ably combining an analysis of the role of Hispanic writers in Coetzee’s intertextualities with an informative description of the novelist’s pro-South activism.
Hispanic Coetzee is a meticulously researched and compelling account of J. M. Coetzee’s interest in Spanish and its literatures, especially those of the Hispanic South. Coetzee is one of the anglophone world’s most distinguished stylists; now we are introduced to the Spanish influences on his writing and to his own far-reaching efforts to distance himself from the hegemony of English, a language he fell into rather than chose. Cristóbal Pérez Barra redraws the map of world literature by following closely the translingual career of a Nobel laureate.
Table of contents
List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Hispanic World-Making
1. Distinctive Circulation: Coetzee in the Spanish Language
2. Enduring Engagement: Neruda and Hispanophone Letters
3. Peripheral World Writing: Borges and the South
4. A Southern Hispanic Narrative: Cervantes and the Jesus Novels
Conclusion: The Expanding Hispanic Universe
Bibliography
Index