J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus

Alisha Mathers (University of Keele); Mariangela Palladino (University of Keele)

Ed. by Helen Rachel Cousins, Newman University
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 7.2.3.03: South Africa and other Southern Writing and Culture.
Vol. editors: Helen Rachel Cousins (Newman University), David Firth (University of Manchester)

Dates

First circulation or publication Mar 2013

Places

South Africa (Country of Origin)
United States (Publication/ performance)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus was published in March 2013, the same month as the publication of letter correspondences between himself and Paul Auster, Here and Now: Letters 2008-2011. Like Coetzee’s magnum opus Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), his novel The Childhood of Jesus (2013) depicts life in “a wholly invented milieu” (Attwell 2015: 246). However, Yoshiki Tajiri distinguishes between the two in that although “is it easy to read the political conditions of South Africa” from the allegorical backdrop in Waiting for the Barbarians, in The Childhood of Jesus, “the deceptively allegorical mode [...] leads us nowhere” (2016: …

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2902 words

Citation: Mathers, Alisha, Mariangela Palladino. "The Childhood of Jesus". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 January 2019 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=34910, accessed 23 November 2024.]

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