Hispanic Coetzee

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.