J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus

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

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

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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: 73). Peter Craven notes this tendency in his review where he remarks that

The Childhood of Jesus

is a novel that functions “at the cliff of…

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2902 words

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

J. M. Coetzee, The Childhood of Jesus

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