A Face without Personality’: Coetzee’s Swiftian Narrators

Authors

  • Gillian Dooley Flinders University
  • Robert Phiddian Flinders University

Keywords:

Jonathan Swift, J.M. Coetzee, narrative voice, Gulliver’s Travels, Elizabeth Costello

Abstract

Much has been written about the complicated intertextual relationships of J.M. Coetzee’s novels to previous works by writers such as Kafka, Dostoevsky, Beckett and, especially, Defoe. Relatively little has been written, by comparison, about any relationship with Defoe’s great contemporary, Swift. We claim no extensive structural relationship between Coetzee’s novels and Swift’s works – nothing like the formal interlace between Robinson Crusoe and Foe, for example. What we do claim, however, is a strong and explicitly signalled likeness of narratorial stance, marked especially by the ironic distance between author and protagonist in Gulliver’s Travels and Elizabeth Costello. We rehearse the quite extensive evidence of Coetzee’s attention to Swift (both in novels and criticism), and suggest that there is a Swiftian dimension to Coetzee’s oeuvre in several books, including Dusklands, Youth, Elizabeth Costello, and Diary of a Bad Year.

Author Biographies

Gillian Dooley, Flinders University

Gillian Dooley is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Flinders University, where she is also a librarian. She writes and presents on various authors including JM Coetzee, and has published a number of monographs and scholarly editions. Her latest monograph is JM Coetzee and the Power of Narrative (Cambria Press, 2010). She is the editor of the electronic journals Transnational Literature and Writers in Conversation.

Robert Phiddian, Flinders University

Robert Phiddian is Associate Professor in English and Deputy Dean of Humanities and Creative arts at Flinders University. He is the author of Swift’s Parody (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and over 30 articles and essays on satire, mostly concerning eighteenth-century literature and contemporary Australian political cartoons. He is co-editor (with Heather Kerr and David Lemmings) of Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture: Public Opinion and Emotional Authenticity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Palgrave, 2015).

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Published

2016-08-10

Issue

Vol. 47 No. 3 (2016): July 2016

Section

Postcolonial Inheritances Cluster

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