Conrad and the Paradox of Plot


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Joseph Conrad's Critical Reception


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This book provides a comprehensive, up-to-date history of the commentary written about the life and works of Joseph Conrad.




Graham Greene’s Conradian Masterplot


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From The Man Within (1929) to The Captain and the Enemy (1988), Graham Greene engaged in a lifelong dialogue with Joseph Conrad's political, psychological and melodramatic fictions. Repressing Conrad's political anxieties, his early work displaces the protagonist's existential dilemma into the form of the thriller or - alternatively -the 'Catholic' novel. After The Quiet American (1955), however, Greene's novels return to politics, introducing comic variations which transform Conrad's 'masterplot' into a mixed genre uniquely his own, a process charted in this book, the first full-length study of the subject.




Under Western Eyes


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Characterized by Conrad himself as his “most deeply meditated novel,” Under Western Eyes enjoyed a warm reception on its publication in October 1911. In the century since it has rewarded readers with various pleasures. Exploring the intertwined subjects of personal morality, the nature of the State, national character and identity, and covertly digging into the tensions of his family's past, the novel is the last of Conrad's sustained excursions into overtly political territory. This collection of eleven essays considers Conrad's achievement from several perspectives. Opening with a provocative essay on the text's genesis, it surveys intertextual relations and influences, considers its ethical challenges, its psychological appeal to our time, and its contemporary reception and reception in Russia. Addressed to the scholar of literary Modernism, “Under Western Eyes”: Centennial Essays offers a vivid snapshot of current critical technologies. This well-balanced collection should help the student and classroom teacher alike in pursuing further the novel's richly layered interests.




Conrad's Marlow


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Variously described as ‘the average pilgrim’, a ‘wanderer’, and ‘a Buddha preaching in European clothes’, Charlie Marlow is the voice behind Joseph Conrad’s ‘Youth’ (1898), Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900) and Chance (1912). Conrad’s Marlow offers a comprehensive account and critical analysis of one of Conrad’s most celebrated creations, asking both who and what is Marlow: a character or a narrator, a biographer or an autobiographical screen, a messenger or an interpreter, a bearer of truth or a misguided liar? Reading Conrad’s fiction alongside the work of Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger, and offering an investigation into the connection between narrative and death, this book argues that Marlow’s essence is located in his liminality – in his constantly shifting position – and that the emergence of meaning in his stories is at all points bound up with the process of his storytelling.




A Wilderness of Words


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Beginning with a detailed discussion of Conrad's ambivalence toward the function of language and the meaning of fiction, Ted Billy explores the problematical sense of an ending in Conrad's tales and novellas. Billy demonstrates that Conrad's endings, instead of reinforcing the meaning of the narrative or lending finality, actually provide a contrasting perspective that clashes with the narrative's general drift.




Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity


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Through attention to incidents of betrayal and self-betrayal in his fiction, this book traces the development of Conrad's conception of identity through the three phases of his career: the self in isolation, the self in society and the sexualised self. It shows how the early fiction negotiates the opposed dangers of the self-ideal and the surrender to passion; how the middle fiction tests the ideal code psychologically and ideologically; and how the late fiction probes sexuality and morbid psychology.




Centennial Essays on Joseph Conrad's Chance


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When Joseph Conrad’s novel Chance appeared in serial form in the New York Herald in 1912 and in book form in 1914 it established the author’s financial security for the first time. Following years of struggle to reach a wide audience for his fiction, Conrad benefitted from the American marketing of this novel for the women readers of romance. Aggressive advertising promoted the writer’s new focus on a female protagonist and Conrad’s division of the story’s location between land and sea. The novel proved popular and lucrative. Yet in spite of its economic success, Chance remains one of Conrad’s less well-known narratives. This fresh new collection of essays from both young and established scholars opens up a lively critical debate taking Chance beyond the status of best-selling romance. In a striking re-evaluation of the novel these writers examine Chance’s innovative narrative strategies, its up-to-the-minute commentary on female politics, contemporary ethics, as well as its antecedents in classical debate and the significance of Conrad’s last use of his seaman narrator Marlow.




"To Make Us See What We See": Impressionism in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness


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This book is an intriguing and intimate study of the dialogues forged between different forms of art, paintings and texts in particular. It entwines art with literature to create a complex yet marvellous mosaic of textures hitherto undiscussed in this manner. Reading, here, becomes both painting and travelling through Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the works of the French Impressionist painters of the nineteenth century. Through an exploration of the distinctive characteristics of the paintings of Monet, Manet, Renoir, Pissarro, Cézanne and even Van Gogh and Gauguin, this book tries to decipher the codes and symbols of Conrad’s enigmatic novella. By taking the help of intertextuality, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches, detours and retours through time and space, this book offers extensive readings of texts on art, literature and Conrad’s works. Reading Heart of Darkness in this manner emerges as a kind of journey through the continents of imperial Europe and of colonized Africa, through diverse cultures, imaginary geographies, psychological processes that separate one human from another, through the metaphors and metonymies of the modern malaise that vacillated from Darwinian theories of evolution to Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God.




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