J. M. Coetzee and Christianity

Alicia Broggi

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350500259
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• New Horizons in Contemporary Writing
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 “The spirit of Geneva triumphant in Africa”: Exorcising Power in Fiction
• 2 “What does it mean to speak of [---]?”: Developing an Apophatic Craft
• 3 “Not grace, then, but at least the body”: Converting Literature
• 4 “Cruciform logic”: Dialogism and the Problem of Evil
• 5 “Is it too late to educate the eye?”: Salvation and Sensibility
• 6 “Why seek ye the living among the dead?”: The Living Word
• “I believe in those little frogs”: A Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index
• Copyright Page