SOURCE: "Text and Hinterland: J. M. Coetzee and the South African Novel," in Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 21, No. 4, December, 1995, pp. 585-99.

In the following essay, Easton suggests that Coetzee places his novels in settings other than South Africa in order to symbolically emphasize himself as a "regional" writer, highlighting as he does the feelings of displacement of most South Africans.

There is a certain paradox in placing a writer in a national or regional context, especially a writer like J. M. Coetzee who has distanced himself from such a reading. However, as much as his novels and scholarly criticism range well beyond a South African terrain, they also track this course—at times—quite deliberately. Think only of 'The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee' in the second half of Dusklands or his collection of essays, White Writing. This article will explore the ambivalent space of Coetzee's fiction...