Serious Fiction explores the novels of J.M. Coetzee in dialogue with key works of the European literary tradition and several contemporary masterworks of world literature in order to flesh out an ethicoaesthetic ideal for the contemporary novel. Serious refers back to the Aristotelian definition of tragedy to revive a certain communal politicalethical task of the artwork fiction also referring back to Aristotle and the subsequent poetic tradition stresses the element of play in the artwork in contrast to the seriousness of the world of daily survival business and life. Following postEnlightenment thinkers from Schiller and Arnold to Leavis and Auerbach as well as more contemporary literary theorists the argument maintains a delicate balance between seriousness as a sort moral criterion of literary assessment and playfulness as a necessary stage in the creation of any artwork adding the formal and epistemological obligations of the realist novel as the dominant literary genre of the long nineteenth century. Coetzee is presented as a contemporary model of serious fiction writing balancing elements of realism and playimagination tragedy and the prosaic aesthetic semiautonomy and ethical responsibility. Major works by Coetzee are discussed Waiting for the Barbarian Life amp Times of Michael K. Disgrace Diary of a Bad Year as well as other of his works fictional and nonfictional along with important traditional and contemporary works by Tolstoy Dostoevsky Joyce Kakfa and Beckett as well as Imre Kertsz W.G. Sebald Eimear McBride Cormac McCarthy Jiang Rong and others.