J. M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style

Jarad Zimbler is a Lecturer in Modern English Literature at the University of Birmingham. He has published articles on book history, Pierre Bourdieu and postcolonial pedagogy, and is co-editor of Crafts of World Literature: Field, Material and Translation, a special issue of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature.

'Zimbler has taken a relatively traditional genre - the single-author monograph aimed at specialists - and armed it with something invigorating: a desire, first, to foreground the compositional concerns of a writer whose critics don't always attend to his handling of form; and, second, to reach beyond Coetzee aficionados by demonstrating assiduous treatments of diction, pace, and timbre that will appeal to anyone interested in contemporary writing.' David James, Public Books (publicbooks.org)

• Introduction; 1. Neither progress, nor regress; 2. New dimensions; 3. Lyrical situation and rhythmic intensity; 4. Native traditions and strange practices; 5. From bare life to soul language; Conclusion.