Hispanic Coetzee: World Literature Beyond the Anglosphere

by Cristóbal Pérez Barra

Overview

Nobel prize-winner J. M. Coetzee’s Jesus novels (2013–19) are marked by distinctive Spanish-language and Hispanic-literatures elements, which bring forward a long elective affinity. Hispanic Coetzee is the first organic interpretation of Coetzee’s oeuvre from a Hispanic perspective which also affirms that writing from ‘the South’ is central to his work. Developing a combined comparative, Spanish and South American perspective that is new in Coetzee scholarship, Cristóbal Pérez Barra shows that the articulation of four Hispanic worlds progressed from Coetzee’s early writings. These include Coetzee’s Spanish translations and his discovery of the Spanish language, his academic work and Southern Cone travels, and his fiction and non-fiction writing, which converge in a Hispanic reality of the mind with a southern component. Hispanic Coetzee argues that Coetzee can only be properly understood as a writer whose work extends beyond the Anglophone sphere – a proposal which recalibrates our sense of his contribution to world literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399547116
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	04/30/2026
Series:	Edinburgh Critical Studies in South-South Literary Engagements
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Cristóbal Pérez Barra practiced Law in Santiago and taught at the Law Faculty of UC Chile, where he obtained a LL.B. (Hons) and an M.St. in Hispanic Literatures. He also holds a D.Phil. in English Literature from the University of Oxford, where he has taught on J. M. Coetzee. He has also published fiction in Spanish, including the short stories collection El descorazonamiento (2012) and the novel Una sombra en la noche (2016) and has translated Coetzee’s Two Elizabeth Costello Lessons (2015) and Julian Barnes’s In the Land of Pain (2017) into Spanish.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Hispanic World-Making
1. Distinctive Circulation: Coetzee in the Spanish Language
2. Enduring Engagement: Neruda and Hispanophone Letters
3. Peripheral World Writing: Borges and the South
4. A Southern Hispanic Narrative: Cervantes and the Jesus Novels
Conclusion: The Expanding Hispanic Universe

Bibliography