Peter D. McDonald teaches English at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. He is working on a book about literature in post-apartheid South Africa.
In a respectful but chary review of The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) in the New York Review of Books, Nadine Gordimer wrote about J.M. Coetzee’s ‘conscious choice’ of allegory as a literary mode in his first three novels. The reasons for this, she speculated, were temperamental:
It seemed he did so out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and...
What exactly is book history? Literature students consulting their reference libraries would be hard put to find an answer: ‘history of the book’ appears nowhere in M.H....
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