4. This chapter gives a detailed account of LTMKs significance, unveiling important new influences and contexts. It provides an original reading of the novel centring on idiocy.

5. This chapter focuses on Foes ending, a book designed to confront with the limits of the novel form. It explores in new detail the evolution of this work from Coetzees drafts.

6. Age of Iron is explored with relation to secularism, the psycho-social theories of Georges Bataille, angelhood, and the poetics of Rilke.

J. M. Coetzee is widely recognised as one of the most important writers working in English. As a South African (now Australian) novelist composing his best-known works in the latter third of the twentieth century, Coetzee has understandably often been read through the lenses of post-colonial theory and post-war ethics. Yet his reception is entering a new phase bolstered by thousands of pages of new and unpublished empirical evidence housed at the J. M. Coetzee archive at The Harry Ransom Center (University of Austin, Texas). This material provokes a re-reading of Coetzee’s project even as it uncovers keys to his process of formal experimentation and compositional evolution up to and including Disgrace (1999). Following Coetzee’s false starts, his confrontation of narrative impasses, and his shifting deployment of source materials, J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of the Novel provides a new series of detailed snapshots of one of the world’s most celebrated authors.

8. Disgrace is read in its relation to numerous unacknowledged narrative influences, including Richardsons Clarissa and Tolstoys Resurrection.

7. This chapter confronts Dostoevskys abandonment to evil in The Master of Petersburg. It provides a new and detailed reading of the first part of the novels manuscript origins.

2. This chapter gives an original account of Coetzees multiple attempts to start a second fiction and reads In the Heart of the Country with relation to Barthes notion of the Sadian.

1. This chapter explores hitherto unacknowledged influences, including McLuhan and Ong, on Dusklands. New light is shed on the novels manuscript origins and its relation to satire.

J. M. Coetzee is widely recognised as one of the most important writers working in English. As a South African (now Australian) novelist composing his best-known works in the latter third of the twentieth century, Coetzee has understandably often been read through the lenses of post-colonial theory and post-war ethics. Yet his reception is entering a new phase bolstered by thousands of pages of new and unpublished empirical evidence housed at the J. M. Coetzee archive at The Harry Ransom Center (University of Austin, Texas). This material provokes a re-reading of Coetzee’s project even as it uncovers keys to his process of formal experimentation and compositional evolution up to and including Disgrace (1999). Following Coetzee’s false starts, his confrontation of narrative impasses, and his shifting deployment of source materials, J. M. Coetzee and the Limits of the Novel provides a new series of detailed snapshots of one of the world’s most celebrated authors.

3. This chapter considers Waiting for the Barbarians with relation to a thematics of impasse and bafflement. It argues Coetzee designed the novel to stall the emergence of meaning.

Far from being celebrated, literature in Beckett’s texts represents something to be avoided at all costs. “But it is not at this late stage of my relation,” Moran asserts near the end of Molloy, “that I intend to give way to literature.” What is this thing that Moran, not unlike his “vice-exister” Malone, must be “on [his] guard” against – and that he invokes like a disbeliever muttering a blasphemy?A negative definition of sorts: in this narrative on the verge of self-cancellation, literature would be a clear statement of relation, an account of “how this result was obtained”; specifically, it would relate how the “dim man” whom Moran encounters in the Molloy country comes to be discovered “stretched on the ground, his head in a pulp” – by the speaker who has presumably bludgeoned him to death. And it would provide an experience of a certain value and pleasure: “it would be something worth reading.”