This is the first book to focus entirely on the under-researched but crucial topic of women in the work of J. M. Coetzee, generally regarded as one of the world's most significant living writers. The fourteen essays in this collection raise the central issue of how Coetzee's texts address the 'woman question'. There is a focus on Coetzee's representation of women, engagement with women writers and the ethics of what has been termed his 'ventriloquism' of women's voices in his fiction and autobiographical writings, right up to his most recent novel, The Schooldays of Jesus. As such, this collection makes important links between the disciplines of literary and gender studies. It includes essays by well-known Coetzee scholars as well as by emerging scholars from around the world, providing fascinating and timely global insights into how his works are read from differing cultural and scholarly perspectives.

This is the first book to focus entirely on the under-researched but crucial topic of women in the work of J. M. Coetzee, generally regarded as one of the world's most significant living writers. The fourteen essays in this collection raise the central issue of how Coetzee's texts address the 'woman question'. There is a focus on Coetzee's representation of women, engagement with women writers and the ethics of what has been termed his 'ventriloquism' of women's voices in his fiction and autobiographical writings, right up to his most recent novel, The Schooldays of Jesus. As such, this collection makes important links between the disciplines of literary and gender studies. It includes essays by well-known Coetzee scholars as well as by emerging scholars from around the world, providing fascinating and timely global insights into how his works are read from differing cultural and scholarly perspectives.

Provides new reflections on literary influence using Katherine Mansfield as a case study. It is commonplace to talk about writers in terms of their similarities with and differences from other writers but how does literary influence actually work? This book seeks to understand this mysterious but powerful impetus for artistic production through an examination of Katherine Mansfield's wide net of literary associations. Mansfield's case proves that influence is careless of chronologies, spatial limits, artistic movements and cultural differences and has many 'shades' or 'tones'. Expanding upon theories of influence that focus on anxiety and coteries, this book shows that it is as often unconscious as it is conscious, and can be evidenced by such things as satire, plagiarism, yearning and resentment. This book seeks to map the ecologies of Mansfield's influence beyond her modernist and postcolonial contexts, observing that they roam wildly over six centuries, across three continents and beyond cultural and linguistic boundaries. Extends upon models of literary influence that are oriented around the ideas of anxiety and coteries; engages with and develops areas of scholarly inquiry investigating modernism as the product of social and intellectual networks; Offers new interpretations of Mansfield's relationships with writers with whom she is often associated, such as D H Lawrence, Anton Chekhov and Virginia Woolf and traces new connections between Mansfield's work and the work of writers not previously linked to Mansfield, such as Evelyn Waugh, Colette and Nettie Palmer.