Almayer's Folly, published in 1895, is Joseph Conrad's first novel. Set in the late 19th century, it centers on the life of the Dutch trader Kaspar Almayer in the Borneo jungle and his relationship with his mixed heritage daughter Nina.
Running Away Doesn't Always Remove the Problem “It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.” - Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands This second novel of Conrad details the undoing of Peter Willems, a disreputable, immoral man who, on the run from a scandal in Makassar, finds refuge in a hidden native village, only to betray his benefactors over lust for the tribal chief's daughter.
One of the finest novels by iconic British author Charles Dickens, this Victorian tale follows the good-natured orphan Pip as he makes his way through life. As a boy, Pip crosses paths with a convict named Magwitch, a man who will heavily influence Pip’s adulthood. Meanwhile, the earnest young man falls for the beautiful Estella, the adoptive daughter of the affluent and eccentric Miss Havisham. Widely considered to be Dickens's last great book, the story is steeped in romance and features the writer's familiar themes of crime, punishment, and societal struggle.
Nineteenth-century adventure fiction relating to the British empire usually served to promote, celebrate and justify the imperial project, asserting the essential and privileging difference between 'us' and 'them', colonizing and colonized. Andrea White's study opens with an examination of popular exploration literature in relation to later adventure stories, showing how a shared view of the white man in the tropics authorized the European intrusion into other lands. She then sets the fiction of Joseph Conrad in this context, showing how Conrad in fact demythologized and disrupted the imperial subject constructed in earlier writing, by simultaneously - with the modernist's double vision - admiring man's capacity to dream but applauding the desire to condemn many of its consequences. She argues that the very complexity of Conrad's work provided an alternative, and more critical, means of evaluating the experience of empire.
First published in 1911, The Quest of the Silver Fleece is set in Washington, D.C., and Alabama. The silver fleece refers to the cotton industry, owned by powerful white men, who continued to make their fortune through the labor of African-Americans. In the story, Blessed Alwyn tries to come to terms with how a black man can integrate into society. He gets an education and moves to Washington, where he meets well-to-do blacks who seem to be living the kind of lives slaves had struggled for. Only, Blessed comes to find out, they have to make many compromises in order to be accepted by their white neighbors. Anyone with an interest in race relations and life at the turn of the 20th century will find this book about economics, race, love, and the hero's quest an astute sociological study. American writer, civil rights activist, and scholar WILLIAM EEDWARD BURGHARDT DUBOIS (1868-1963) was the first black man to receive a PhD from Harvard University. A cofounder of the NAACP, he wrote a number of important books, including The Philadelphia Negro (1899), Black Folk, Then and Now (1899), and The Negro (1915).