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In the first critical study wholly devoted to Joseph Conrad's use of techniques associated with the literary tradition of romance, Katherine Isobel Baxter 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, Baxter 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. Baxter 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.
Conrad's fiction is characterized by an enduring recourse to the performing arts for metaphor, allegory, symbol, and subject matter; however, this aspect of Conrad's non-dramatic works has only recently begun to come into its own among literary critics. In response to this seminal moment, Joseph Conrad and the Performing Arts offers an exciting, interdisciplinary forum for one of the most interesting and nascent areas of Conrad studies. Adopting a variety of theoretical approaches, the contributors examine major and neglected works within the context of the performing arts: cultural performance in Conrad's Malay fiction; Conrad's use and parody of popular traditions such as melodrama, Grand-Guignol, and commedia dell'arte; Conrad's engagement with the visual culture of early cinema; Conrad's interest in the motifs of shadowgraphy (shadow plays); Conrad's relationship to Shakespeare; and the enduring influence of opera on his work. Taken together, the essays provide, through solid scholarship and richly provocative speculation, new insight into Conrad's oeuvre, and invite future dialogue in the burgeoning field of Conrad and the performing arts.
Opens up the rich topic of Joseph Conrad's complex relationship with languageJoseph Conrad was, famously, trilingual in Polish, French and English, and was also familiar with German, Russian, Dutch and Malay. He was also a consummate stylist, using words with the precision of a poet in his fiction.The essays in this collection examine his engagement with specific lexical sets and terminology - maritime language, the language of terror, and abstract language; issues of linguistic communication - speech, hearing, and writing; and his relationship to specific languages - his deployment of foreign languages, his decision to write in English, and his reception through translation. The collection ...
A sequel to A Portrait in Letters: Correspondence to and about Joseph Conrad (Rodopi, 1995), this volume collects and annotates letters to Joseph Conrad by his family, friends, admirers, and publishers. An indispensable companion to the writer's own letters, it restores the quality of exchange, interaction, and debate that belongs to a major correspondence. It also leads to a fuller, more rounded picture of Conrad in his personal and professional dealings: both of the mutualities and rituals that underpinned his close friendships and of the terms underlying his mutual disagreements with others. Familiar names are here – Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, Edward Garnett, Ford Madox Ford, Bert...
Offering an exciting forum for one of the most interesting and nascent areas of Conrad studies, this collection examines major and neglected works within the context of the performing arts, including popular theatrical traditions, early cinema, shadow plays, Shakespeare, and opera. Taken together, the essays provide, through solid scholarship and richly provocative speculation, new insight into Conrad's oeuvre, and invite future dialogue in the burgeoning field of Conrad and the performing arts.
The Discerning Narrator sheds new light on Joseph Conrad’s controversial critique of modernity and modernization by reading his work through an Aristotelian lens. The book proposes that we need Aristotle – a key figure in Conrad’s education – to recognize the profound significance of Conrad’s artistic vision. Offering Aristotelian analyses of Conrad’s letters, essays, and four works of fiction, Alexia Hannis illuminates the philosophical roots and literary implications of Conrad’s critique of modernity. Hannis turns to Aristotle’s ethical formulations to trace what she calls "the discerning narrator" in Conrad’s oeuvre: a compassionate yet sceptical guide to appraising char...
The first book specifically devoted to the history and prospects of the new modernist studies.
Imagined States examines representations of the law in British and Nigerian high-brow, middle-brow and popular fiction and journalism. It reads works by Chinua Achebe, Joyce Cary, Cyprian Ekwensi and Edgar Wallace, together with a range of Nigerian market literature and journalism.
Opens up the rich topic of Joseph Conrad's complex relationship with languageJoseph Conrad was, famously, trilingual in Polish, French and English, and was also familiar with German, Russian, Dutch and Malay. He was also a consummate stylist, using words with the precision of a poet in his fiction.The essays in this collection examine his engagement with specific lexical sets and terminology - maritime language, the language of terror, and abstract language; issues of linguistic communication - speech, hearing, and writing; and his relationship to specific languages - his deployment of foreign languages, his decision to write in English, and his reception through translation. The collection ...
Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Joseph Conrad's novels and short stories have consistently figured into - and helped to define - the dominant trends in literary criticism. This book is the first to provide a thorough yet accessible overview of Conrad scholarship and criticism spanning the entire history of Conrad studies, from the 1895 publication of his first book, Almayer's Folly, to the present. While tracing the general evolution of the commentary surrounding Conrad's work, John G. Peters's careful analysis also evaluates Conrad's impact on critical trends such as the belles lettres tradition, the New Criticism, psychoanalysis, structuralist and post-structuralist criticism, narratology, postcolonial studies, gender and women's studies, and ecocriticism. The breadth and scope of Peters's study make this text an essential resource for Conrad scholars and students of English literature and literary criticism.