University Press of America
Pages: 126
•
Trim: 6 x 9
978-0-7618-6693-0 • Paperback • December 2015 • $38.99 • (£30.00)
978-0-7618-6694-7 • eBook • December 2015 • $37.00 • (£30.00)
Jonathan Crewe is the Leon Black Emeritus Professor of Shakespearean Studies at Dartmouth College. Born in South Africa, he received his undergraduate education at the University of Natal, and then completed his graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written numerous books and articles on early modern literature, including Shakespeare, and on South African writing.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: Arrival
Chapter 2: Settling In
Chapter 3: Flashbacks
Chapter 4: Boyhood
Chapter 5: Disgrace
Chapter 6: Master Classes: White Writing
Part-memoir, part-biography, part-criticism, Jonathan Crewe’s account of the provenance of J.M. Coetzee’s fiction is erudite and poignant. In the Middle of Nowhere is the story of a friendship, but one rooted in a shared background and situation. As young literary intellectuals at odds with colonial ‘English,’ both found wider horizons in the American academy, but without being able to put the past firmly behind them. The intimacy of Crewe’s account of the Nobel laureate’s intellectual biography makes it essential reading in Coetzee studies.
— David Attwell, English and Related Literature, The University of York
Jonathan Crewe helped launch his own distinguished career as a critic with a prescient 1974 article on Dusklands, hailing a new kind of South African novel. J. M. Coetzee's colleague and compatriot in Cape Town in the early 1970s, and his friend then and since, Crewe returns to Coetzee studies with this fascinating critical memoir of their relationship.
— Lars Engle, The University of Tulsa