Author(s): Anthony Uhlmann

Culture & Ideas

In this major reassessment of J. M. Coetzee, which looks at Coetzee's full writing career thus far, Anthony Uhlmann illuminates the intellectual and philosophical interests that drive Coetzee's writing. In doing so, Uhlmann makes the case for Coetzee as an important and original thinker in his own right.

Whilst looking at Coetzee's writing career, from his dissertation through to The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), and interpreting running themes and scenarios, style, and evolving attitudes to literary form, Uhlmann also offers revealing glimpses, informed by archival research, of Coetzee's writing process. Among the main themes that Uhlmann draws out from Coetzee's writing, and which remain highly relevant today, are the ideas that there is truth in fiction, or that fiction can provide valuable understandings of real world problems, and there are also fictions of the truth: that we are surrounded, in our everyday lives, by stories we wish to believe are true.

J. M. Coetzee: Truth, Meaning, Fiction offers a revealing new account of our most significant contemporary writers.