Linda Dryden places Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands , 'Karain', and Lord Jim in the context of the nineteenth-century imperial romance. Through the thwarted dreams and aspirations of his central characters she argues that Conrad exposes the empty promises of such fiction and challenges assumptions about the superiority of European imperialists and the imperial venture itself. Using illustrations from and references to many well-known novels of Empire, Dryden demonstrates how Conrad's Malay fiction alludes to the conventions and stereotypes of popular imperial fiction.
For one hundred years, Heart of Darkness has been among the most widely read and taught novels in the English language. Hailed as an incisive indictment of European imperialism in Africa upon its publication in 1899, more recently it has been repeatedly denounced as racist and imperialist. Peter Firchow counters these claims, and his carefully argued response allows the charges of Conrad's alleged bias to be evaluated as objectively as possible. He begins by contrasting the meanings of race, racism, and imperialism in Conrad's day to those of our own time. Firchow then argues that Heart of Darkness is a novel rather than a sociological treatise; only in relation to its aesthetic significance can real social and intellectual-historical meaning be established. Envisioning Africa responds in detail to negative interpretations of the novel by revealing what they distort, misconstrue, or fail to take into account. Firchow uses a framework of imagology to examine how national, ethnic, and racial images are portrayed in the text, differentiating the idea of a national stereotype from that of national character. He believes that what Conrad saw personally in Africa should not be confused with the Africa he describes in the novel; Heart of Darkness is instead an envisioning and a revisioning of Conrad's experiences in the medium of fiction.
The Cambridge History of the English Novel chronicles an ever-changing and developing body of fiction across three centuries. An interwoven narrative of the novel's progress unfolds in more than fifty chapters, charting continuities and innovations of structure, tracing lines of influence in terms of themes and techniques, and showing how greater and lesser authors shape the genre. Pushing beyond the usual period-centered boundaries, the History's emphasis on form reveals the range and depth the novel has achieved in English. This book will be indispensable for research libraries and scholars, but is accessibly written for students. Authoritative, bold and clear, the History raises multiple useful questions for future visions of the invention and re-invention of the novel.
Joseph Conrad's novels and short stories explore the nature of narrative, reality, and competing notions of truth. This new volume offers a new selection of contemporary critical commentary on the author of such classic works as ""Lord Jim"", ""Nostromo"", and ""Heart of Darkness"". This new edition also contains an introduction penned by literary scholar Harold Bloom, a bibliography, a chronology of the author's life, and an index for reference.
In the first critical study wholly devoted to Joseph Conrad's use of techniques associated with the literary tradition of romance, the author argues that Conrad's engagement with the genre invigorated his work throughout his career. Exploring the ways in which Conrad borrows from, alludes to, and subverts the tropes of romance, the author suggests that Conrad's ambivalent relationship with popular forms like the adventure novel is revealed in the way he uses romance conventions to disrupt narrative expectations and make visible ethical problems with Europe's colonial project. The author examines not only familiar novels like Lord Jim but also less-studied works such as Romance and The Rover, using Robert Miles's model of the 'philosophical romance' to show that for Conrad, romance is also philosophically engaged with issues of ideology. Her study enables a new appreciation of the ways in which Conrad continued to experiment, even in his later fiction, and of the ethical import of that aesthetic experimentation.
This book traces the literary friendship between Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells from their early correspondence through to the differences that caused their estrangement, including their respective responses to the First World War. It thus gives an overview of the literary scene in the late Victorian and early Edwardian period.
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.
