JM Coetzee and the Aesthetics of place is an edited collection of essays written by local and international authors. Each essay focuses on some aspect of the aesthetic and/or ethical implications of Coetzee's treatment of setting. The emphasis of the title falls on the novels that are set in South Africa, and on pertinent themes that appear in his other works (for example, the 'quest for an authentic language' to depict an African landscape, the political and geographic displacements of censorship, questions of linguistic and cultural translation, the complex relationships between genre and setting). This collection of essays thus aims to extend the range of existing criticism by focusing on the aesthetic and ethical implications of Coetzee's relation to South Africa - a relation which is played out in his fiction and non-fictional writings in complex ways.