Hispanic Coetzee

Examines the connections between J. M. Coetzee’s work and Hispanic literatures and cultures, especially in the Southern Hemisphere Draws on the whole Coetzee corpus in English and Spanish translation, unpublished work and interviews, and new archival material Engages with Hispanic literatures figures like Cervantes, Neruda and Borges, showing how they influenced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.