Ashley Chantler. Heart of Darkness: Character Studies. Continuum, 2008.

"Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is one of the most important literary works of the early twentieth century. It has provoked much critical debate, on issues such as fin de siecle doubt and pessimism, European colonialism, racism, and misogyny. Engaging with the novel's characters is crucial to understanding its complexity and its critical history. This study includes an overview of the novel, including an account of its late nineteenth-century context discussions of the narrative structure and the narrators; chapters analyzing in detail the key characters in relation to the text's themes, issues and historical context; engagement with a range of literary criticism and theory; a conclusion reminding students of the potential of detailed character analysis and close critical reading; a guide to secondary texts and a bibliography."

     John G. Peters, ed. Conrad in the Public Eye: Biography / Criticism / Publicity. Rodopi, 2008.

"This is a collection of difficult-to-find and typically early commentary that sheds light on Conrad's life and works, as well as the way in which his works were promoted to the public. Selections include those by the American novelist Christopher Morley and the Irish novelist Liam O'Flaherty. Also included is a previously unpublished essay by Conrad's friend Richard Curle. Of particular interest are the promotional materials, which are collected together for the first time and reveal how Conrad was perceived by the general reading public and how he was marketed by his publishers."

     James Phelan, Jeremy Hawthorn, and Jakob Lothe, eds. Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre. Ohio State University Press, 2008.

"Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre argues that narrative theory, and especially some of its more recent developments, can help critics generate greater insight into the complexities of Conrad's work; and that a rigorous engagement with Conradian narrative can lead theorists to a further honing of their analytical tools. More particularly, the volume focuses on the four narrative issues identified in the subtitle, and it analyzes examples of Conrad's fiction and nonfiction, from early work such as An Outcast of the Islands to his late work of reminiscence, A Personal Record. The volume also provides multiple perspectives on major works such as Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, a cluster of three essays on Nostromo and history, and an afterword by the editors that looks ahead to future work on the interrelations of Conrad and narrative theory. This collection brings together essays by established critics of Conrad and by leading narratologists that explore Conrad's innovative uses of narrative throughout his career. Collectively, these explorations by Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Gail Fincham, Jeremy Hawthorn, Susan Jones, Jakob Lothe, J. Hillis Miller, Zdzislaw Najder, Josiane Paccaud-Huguet, James Phelan, Christophe Robin, Allan H. Simmons, and John Stape investigate these issues."

     Richard Ruppel. Homosexuality in the Life and Work of Joseph Conrad: Love between the Lines. Palgrave, 2008.

"Homoeroticism and Homosexuality in the Life and Fiction of Joseph Conrad examines the representations of homosexuality and homoeroticism in Conrad's fiction. Drawing on the work of Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Robert Hodges, Wayne Koestenbaum, Christopher Lane, and others who have already begun unearthing and analyzing this subject, the author traces Conrad's representations of homosexuality and homoeroticism, beginning with the Malay works and ending with The Shadow-Line. In Conrad's lifetime, the homosexual species came under increasing scrutiny, definition, and censure; same-sex desire was an increasingly contested issue within popular, legal, and medical discourses. Ruppel argues that Conrad's fiction traces this interest, though most often in subterranean ways."

    Paul Wake. Conrad's Marlow: Narrative and Death in "Youth," "Heart of Darkness," Lord Jim, and Chance. Manchester University Press, 2008.

"Described as 'the average pilgrim' a 'wanderer,' and 'a Buddha preaching in European clothes,' Charlie Marlow is the voice behind Joseph Conrad's 'Youth,' 'Heart of Darkness,' Lord Jim, and Chance. Conrad's Marlow offers an 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? Offering an investigation into the connection between narrative and death, this book argues that Marlow's essence is located in his constantly shifting position and that the emergence of meaning in his stories is bound up with the process of his storytelling."

     Agnes Swee Kim Yeow. Conrad's Eastern Vision: A Vain and Floating Appearance. Palgrave, 2008.

"This book traces the dialogic relation between Conrad's Eastern fiction and other histories and argues that it is precisely in the intersections of art and history that we locate Conrad's irony. The dialogism of Conrad's East resists any finalising meaning, and its loophole lies in subjective vision. Yeow suggests that, in a direct response to the visual culture of his times, Conrad sets up his fictional world as a hallucinated mirage even as he stresses the veracity of his own Eastern vision."

     D. Goonetilleke. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: A Routledge Guide. Routledge, 2007.

"Joseph Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness, has fascinated critics and readers alike, engaging them in highly controversial debate as it deals with fundamental issues of good and evil, civilisation, race, love and heroism. This classic tale transcends the boundaries of time and place and has inspired famous film and television adaptations emphasising the cultural significance and continued relevance of the book. This guide to Conrad's captivating novel offers an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of Heart of Darkness; a critical history, surveying the many interpretations of the text from publication to the present; a selection of new essays and reprinted critical essays on Heart of Darkness, by Ian Watt, Linda Dryden, Ruth Nadelhaft, J. Hillis Miller and Peter Brooks, providing a range of perspectives on the novel and extending the coverage of key critical approaches identified in the survey section; cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism; suggestions for further reading. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is intended for all those beginning detailed study of Heart of Darkness and seeking not only a guide to the novel, but a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds Conrad's text."

     Walter Goebel, Ulrich Seeber, and Martin Windisch, eds. Conrad in Germany. East European Monographs, 2007.

"This is a collection of essay, some of which consider Conrad's reception in Germany and the translation of his works into German. The remaining essays deal with Modernism and its discontents and with the Nautic quest. All are written by German scholars."

"This book presents a sustained critique of the interlinked (and contradictory) views that the fiction of Joseph Conrad is largely innocent of any interest in or concern with sexuality and the erotic, and that when Conrad does attempt to depict sexual desire or erotic excitement, this results in bad writing. Hawthorn argues for a revision of the view that Conrad lacks understanding of and interest in sexuality. He argues that the comprehensiveness of Conrad's vision does not exclude a concern with the sexual and the erotic, and that this concern is not with the sexual and the erotic as separate spheres of human life, but as elements dialectically related to those matters public and political that have always been recognized as central to Conrad's fictional achievement. The book is intended to open Conrad's fiction to readings enriched by the insights of critics and theorists associated with Gender Studies and Post-colonialism."

"Joseph Conrad is not only recognized as one of the world's great writers of English--and world--literature, but as a writer who lived a fascinating, unusually full and adventurous life. But Conrad's life presents the biographer with uncommon difficulty because, whether due to his itinerancy as a young man, the destruction of documentary evidence in the turmoil of the twentieth century, or the discreetness and relative isolation Conrad cultivated in his years as a writer, there are many periods for which documentation is difficult. Zdzislaw Najder's biography first appeared in English in 1983, a product of twenty-five yeas of painstaking study, and received great praise as the best, most complete biography of Conrad. Najder's command of English, French, Polish and Russian allowed him access to a greater variety of sources than any other biographer, and this has again come into play in the present revised edition. It provides extensive new material, much of it unearthed in newly opened former east-bloc archives. Najder's Polish background and his own experience as an exile in the 1980's have afforded him an unmatched affinity for Conrad and his milieu. There is new material on Conrad's father's genealogy and his role as a Polish national leader; Conrad's service in the French and British merchant marines; his early English reading and correspondence; his experiences in the Congo and their international context; the circumstances of writing A Personal Record and Under Western Eyes; and much more. In addition, several aspects of Conrad's life and works are more thoroughly and precisely analyzed: his problems with the English language; his borrowings from French writers; his attitude toward socialism; and his reaction to the reception of his books. New material makes up a quarter of the text of the revised edition and almost three-quarters of the references."

     Kieran O'Hara. Joseph Conrad Today. Imprint Academic, 2007.

"O'Hara argues that the novelist Joseph Conrad's work speaks directly to us in a way that none of his contemporaries can. Conrad's skepticism, pessimism, emphasis on tHeart of Darkness uncovers the rotten core of the Eurocentric myth of imperialism as a way of bringing enlightenment to 'native peoples'--lessons which are relevant once more as the Iraq debacle has undermined the claims of liberal democracy to universal significance. The result can hardly be called a political program, but Conrad's work is clearly suggestive of a skeptical conservatism. The difficult part of a Conradian philosophy is the profundity of his pessimism--far greater than Oakeshott, with whom Conrad does share some similarities (though closer to a conservative politician like Salisbury). Conrad's work poses the question of how far we as a society are prepared to face the consequences of our ignorance."

      Martin Ray. Joseph Conrad: Memories and Impressions - A Bibliography. Rodopi, 2007.

"This bibliography, the first volume in the new Conrad Studies Series published by Rodopi in cooperation with The Joseph Conrad Society (UK), collects and annotates impressions and memories of Joseph Conrad by his family, friends, and acquaintances. It covers both full-length memoirs as well as newspaper and magazine articles, and in its wide sweep offers abundant details about the novelist's personality and life. Of particular value is Martin Ray's emphasis on difficult-to-trace items and the in-depth coverage of Conrad's trip to the United States in the spring of 1923. Expected to be an essential tool for the scholar, this book can also be read with pleasure for the light it throws on Conrad the man."

    Allan H. Simmons. Conrad's Heart of Darkness: A Reader's Guide. Continuum, 2007.

"Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" is a central text in the flowering of Modernist literature in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and one of the most important literary works of the twentieth century. This guide provides an introduction to the novella and includes a survey of its influence in arts as diverse as music, cinema, travelogue, and fiction. This introduction to the text is a companion to study, offering chapters on: Literary and historical context; Language, style, and form; a Reading of the text; Critical reception and publishing history; and Adaptation and interpretation."

     J. H. Stape. The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad. Heinemann, 2007.

"Conrad's impact has been so profound and far-reaching that, eighty years after his death, he remains an essential cultural reference point. Such phrases as 'heart of darkness' and 'The horror! The horror!' have entered the language, often cited without an awareness of their original contexts. His popular legacy extends to Latin American fiction, to the spy novel, to the terrorist and anarchist character, and to film. The writers he has influenced range from T. S. Eliot to William Faulkner to V. S. Naipaul and John Le Carre. For a writer of 'difficult' fiction he has enjoyed a remarkably wide impact, yet as Marlow proclaims in Lord Jim of the figure whose story he tells, 'he was one of us,' and so Conrad remains in fascinating ways. Stape's biography--an intimate portrait, including previously unpublished photographs--offers a Conrad for our times, a man with a deep sense of otherness, of multiple cultural identities and, writing in his third language, a working writer always worried about his royalties, whose novels and stories are a cornerstone of literary Modernism and, indeed, of modernity itself."

"Joseph Conrad's consistent concern is with the state of humanity vis-a-vis its nature, ideas and ideals in a complex world. His treatment of his protagonists and themes addresses the modernist concerns and views of humanity as placed in a political universe. Whether it is the pushes and pulls of a human being's inner self or the outer world, humanity's movement in the universe is shown to be oscillatory rather than linear. And Conrad's approach to his subject is suffused with a gothic sensibility that has not been adequately addressed. This study is an attempt to analyze Conrad's works, in terms of theme and technique, from the gothic perspective."

"The popular yet complex work of Joseph Conrad has attracted much critical attention over the years, from the perspectives of postcolonial, modernist, cultural and gender studies. This guide to Conrad's compelling work is intended to offer: an accessible introduction to the contexts and many interpretations of Conrad's texts, from publication to the present; an introduction to key critical texts and perspectives on Conrad's life and work, situated in a broader critical history; cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism; suggestions for further reading. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is intended as essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Joseph Conrad and seeking not only a guide to his works but also a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds them."

"Whereas Marlow has usually been discussed as a literary device who is of no special interest in himself, this study argues that Conrad portrays Marlow and his relationships with a psychological depth that is unsurpassed in literature. In "Youth," "Heart of Darkness," and Lord Jim, he is a continuously-evolving character whose thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are expressions of his personality and experience. Understanding Marlow's motivations newly illuminates the formal complexity and thematic richness of these works, for his inner conflicts profoundly affect the structure of his narrations, his interactions with his auditors, and the elusive meanings of his tales."

"Joseph Conrad is one of the most intriguing and important modernist novelists. His writing continues to preoccupy twenty-first-century readers. This introduction is aimed at students coming to Conrad's work for the first time. The rise of postcolonial studies has inspired new interest in Conrad's themes of travel, exploration, and racial and ethnic conflict. Peters explains how these themes are explored in his major works, Nostromo, Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, as well as his short stories. He provides an essential overview of Conrad's fascinating life and career and his approach to writing and literature. A guide to further reading is included which points to some of the most useful secondary criticism on Conrad. This is intended to be a comprehensive and concise introduction to studying Conrad, and is intended to be essential reading for students of the twentieth-century novel and of modernism."

"Hastily written in pencil and serialized in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899 as 'The Heart of Darkness,' and later published in book form in 1902, as Heart of Darkness, the sibylline charm of the novel has established it as one of the most important canonical texts of British literature. Critics have seen the book as an 'angry document on absurd and brutal exploitation' (Guerard), 'probably the greatest short novel in English' (Karl), 'an annunciation of the Savage God' (Cox), an adventure story, an early instance of modern fiction, an existential novel, and an early specimen of New Historicism. The novel 'turns on a double paradox' (Hillis Miller), and 'addresses itself simultaneously to Europe's exploitation of Africa, the primeval human situation, an archaic aspect of the mind's structure and a condition of moral baseness' (Party). But at the same time the novel has elicited an angry reaction from Chinua Achebe who calls Conrad, 'a bloody racist.' The present study, one in the series of Atlantic Critical Studies, attempts to make a close reading of the novel, and examines its various aspects never losing the touch with the reality of the academic needs of the students of English literature."

"This non-academic author explores Conrad's classic Lord Jim as a clinic in the psychology of the self, a novel whose characters are designed to reflect various degrees of integration of self-image and action and independence from the approval of others. Conrad's character construction anticipates the findings and theories of modern psychology, particularly those of psychological differentiation and to a lesser extent Jung and Freud. The main contrast in the clinic of the self is between the independent Marlow and the dependent Jim. After Jim fails to do his duty as First Mate on a ship named the Patna, he is judged by a court of inquiry and humiliated. Pathologically subject to shame because of the lack of any secure self, the dependent Jim attempts to hide by moving from port to port and finally into the jungle in out of the way Patusan. Crowned Lord Jim by the natives, he meets a seemingly inevitable fate because of his continuing need for approval from others. The independent Marlow helps Jim and in the process develops nuanced attitudes beyond conventional morality. Anderson sees the principal art of the novel as the connection Conrad forged between Jim and the Patna. Damaged by a submerged object while carrying Muslim pilgrims on their annual pilgrimage, the cause and effect of damage to the ship are metaphors for the cause and effect of Jim's psychic damage, damage that makes him susceptible to the pressure of opinions of others. Damaged early by the lack of a mother's nurture, Jim has no strong inner bulkheads to resist the pressure of the opinions of others. This author views the background of the novel, the background against which Conrad constructed Jim's life drama, to include the Garden of Eden myth and the attitudes towards free will in Islam and Christianity. As he did with works by Joyce, Faulkner and Flaubert, Anderson gives his analysis in a chapter by chapter and selected paragraph by paragraph reading of the novel."

"By exploring the relationships between African novels and Joseph Conrad's fiction, this book examines the many discontinuous functions postcolonial revisions of 'the canon' can serve. While contemporary literary studies too often represent such revisions merely as a means for postcolonial writers to challenge a colonial world view, Caminero-Santangelo explores how African authors engage with a wide range of historically specific ideologies generated by particular histories of national independence and the development of postcolonial nations. The shift in focus away from a single colonial moment enables Caminero-Santangelo to detect a complex interweaving of convergence and divergence between Conrad and African writers such as Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Nadine Gordimer, Tayeb Salih, and Ama Ata Aidoo, who use Conradian intertexts to intervene in repressive situations in late twentieth-century Africa. By emphasizing the need to contextualize acts of writing and rewriting in precise historical terms, the author points to the limitation seven the dangers of the standard cultural binary (Western colonial/African postcolonial) and the static dialectic of colonial domination and postcolonial resistance embraced by much recent cultural criticism."

"Across the twentieth century Joseph Conrad's colonial novels were read from radically different perspectives and interpreted through a wide range of discourses. By the century's end these fictions, which record the encounters between Europe and Europe's 'Other' at the moment of high imperialism, had become key texts in the burgeoning field of postcolonial studies. In this study Collits tackles what is now a central question in both postcolonial studies and Conrad scholarship: what happens when Conrad's novels are read from the perspective of the colonized? Drawing on many years of research and a rich body of critical approaches, including psychoanalysis, feminism, and discourse analysis, Postcolonial Conrad not only offers fresh readings of Conrad's novels of imperialism but also maps and analyses the interpretative tradition they have generated. Collits begins by examining the reception of Conrad's work in terms of the history of ideas, traditional literary criticism, concepts of 'Englishness,' Marxism and postcolonialism. The novels he then selects for detained re-evaluation are Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and Victory. Collits's wide-ranging volume re-examines a century of literary history, analysing the ways in which changing political, pedagogical and theoretical conditions have generated an interpretative tradition of extraordinary density. Postcolonial Conrad concludes by identifying lines of political criticism that are emerging in the twenty-first century and thus asks anew in what terms we might understanding these powerful and intriguing novels."

"This volume collects the papers given at the Second International Conference of Conrad scholars, hosted by the University of Pisa in September 2004, to commemorate the Italian publisher and eminent Conrad scholar and translator, Ugo Mursia (1916-1982). Bringing together the results of new research by the most eminent scholars and critics in the field, The Ugo Mursia Memorial Lectures pay homage to Dr. Mursia's thorough research of original documents, and reveal the wide international admiration for his fine Italian edition of Conrad's complete works. In their variety of methodological approaches, these twenty-three new essays, presented here in the same order as in the Conference sessions, deal with 'Conrad and the Classical World,' the 'Centenary of Nostromo,' and 'Conrad's Reception in Italy.' The wide range of these in-depth explorations and findings provide fresh insights and original appraisals of Conrad's artistic achievement."

"Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture offers an alternative to the view of Joseph Conrad as far removed from the world of Victorian and Edwardian popular culture. From a prototype video arcade in wartime Vienna to the tourist hordes of Capri to the driving seat of a speeding Cadillac in Kent, it shows how Conrad's exposure to the experiences and artefacts of modern popular culture exercised a formative influence on his fiction. Through detailed readings of The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', Typhoon, The Secret Agent, Lord Jim and Chance, it seeks to recover the full significance of panoramas, moving pictures, magic lantern effects, waxwork tableaux, Thomas Cook's globetrotters, and the new sport of hiking for some of Conrad's best-known works. Drawing on previously unpublished images and archival materials as diverse as Bovril advertisements and spirit photographs, this study reveals popular culture as a key historical context for this major Modernist writer and should be of interest to all students, scholars and enthusiasts of Conrad."

"This book consists of eight articles x-raying Conrad's life events and literary achievements. The main topics, included herein are--'Joseph Conrad: An Overview'; 'Testing for Truth: Joseph Conrad and the Ideology of the Examination'; 'The Moral Sense in Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim'; 'Contextualizing and Comprehending Joseph Conrad's "The Return"'; 'Colonizers, Cannibals and the Horror of Good Intentions in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness'; 'Joseph Conrad's "Sudden Holes" in Time: The Epistemology of Temporality'; 'Politics, Modernity and Domesticity: The Gothicism of Conrad's The Secret Agent'; '"Signifying Nothing": Conrad's Idiots and the Anxiety of Modernism.'"

"This study considers various aspects of the relationship between Conrad's literary work and his roots in Polish and East-Central European culture. In particular, it examines various aspects of Conrad's relationship to Poland--the evolution of his attitude toward his homeland, the influence of Polish literature on his work, his reception by Polish audiences--and to Russian literature, particularly Dostoevsky and Turgenev. This volume collects 14 essays by scholars from the United States, Europe and beyond. It is critically diverse, containing elements of biography, psychoanalysis, film criticism, comparative literature, and sociological and philosophical interpretation. The scope of critical materials is equally wide-ranging: from considerations of Conrad's life and political attitudes to overviews of his entire oeuvre and focused studies of single literary works."

"This book seeks to renew interest in Joseph Conrad's moral imagination--not literary theory but the dignity of creative literature impels the author's reflections on Conrad's novels in their 'varied shades of moral significance.' Here, the author approaches Conrad's novels in the context of what the novelist V. S. Naipaul writes: 'In fiction he did not seek to discover; he sought to explain; the discovery of every tale is a moral one.' In his interpretations, the author focuses on the consequences of moral darkness and moral warfare as he proceeds to look at Conrad's basic ideas and meaning. The book argues that morality in Conrad's work is not reducible to an absolute category but must be apprehended in the forms of both moral crises and the possibility of moral recovery enacted in their complexity and tensions. Guiding a reader's travels to the furthest realms of Conrad's imagination so as to penetrate to the heart of the novelist's moral vision is one of the author's dominant aims. These travels take the reader to The Secret Agent, Lord Jim, Victory, Under Western Eyes, Chance, and The Rover. At the center of this study is a long chapter on Nostromo. The author views this novel as representative of Conrad's supreme vision of the human world and the human soul in disorder. No chapter better describes how society and character are radically transformed by 'material interests' that defy first principles.   Anyone disturbed by post-modernist advocates of a New World Order may have much to ponder in this challenging book."

"In the century since its publication in 1904, Nostromo has taken its place among Conrad's masterpieces as a panoramic novel of revolution and a profound meditation on history and the effects of 'material interest' on human destiny. The eight new essays brought together in this volume examine the novel from various perspectives: as an epic, as a study in colonialism and the problem of 'homecoming,' as an exploration of free will and determinism, as a textual artifact, and as a reflection upon earlier works of European literature by Coleridge, Pushkin and others."

     John P. Anderson. Conrad's Victory: Resurrection Lost. Universal Publishers, 2004.

"This is a detailed reader's guide to the power of Conrad's novel Victory. This non-academic author analyzes Conrad's format as a conflict between the life philosophies of Buddhist separation and Holy Spirit connection, a conflict played out dramatically in the emotional relationship of one man and one woman living on a remote south sea island. Anderson identifies the major themes as follows. Axel Heyst, living alone to avoid emotional entanglements, nonetheless rescues Lena from a touring orchestra, and they escape to live together on his remote island. Lena's connection to Heyst matures from initial interest to sexual love to selfless or spiritual love. But Heyst's response to her remains stuck in sexual possession. Given this failure of love connection, representatives of evil arrive on the island shortly thereafter. The victory of the title is Lena's victory over the fear of death that generates the selfish 'me first' attitude in humans. Grounded in love for Heyst, she achieves a permanent and real sense of self and an ability to deal with evil. Finally the Holy Spirit force field powers her ultimate sacrifice for Heyst. He remains self-possessed, ultimately giving nothing of himself to Lena, but ironically without a secure sense of self or the ability to deal with evil. This author sees Conrad's large structure for Heyst's failure of the spirit as the biblical account of Mary Magdalene's part in the Resurrection of Christ. Heyst's failure to love Lena is his resurrection lost. This author also analyzes the sophisticated art of this novel as an unfolding from stem-cell metaphors into more specialized metaphors producing a powerful artistic victory."

     Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Allan H. Simmons, and J. H. Stape, eds. Joseph Conrad: The Short Fiction. Rodopi, 2004.

"Joseph Conrad: The Short Fiction offers a wide range of perspectives on Conrad's short stories. The nine essays deal with early and classic stories as well as the relatively neglected works of Conrad's later career. The essays explore in depth the historical and publishing contexts of individual stories and provide new insights into Conrad's practice as a writer of short fiction. These new readings, based on contemporary theoretical and interpretive perspectives, are directed not only to specialists of literary Modernism but also to the advanced student and the general reader. Essays include Jurgen Kramer, 'What the Country Doctor "did not see": The Limits of Imagination in "Amy Foster"'; Cedric Watts, 'Fraudulent Signifiers: Saussure and the Sixpence in "Karain"'; Sema Postacioglu-Banon, '"Gaspar Ruiz": A Vitagraph of Desire'; P. A. March-Russell, 'The Anarchy of Love: "The Informer"'; Michael Lucas, 'Rehabilitating "The Brute"'; Stephen Donovan, 'Magic Letters and Mental Degradation: Advertising in "An Anarchist" and "The Partner"'; Mark D. Larabee, 'Territorial Vision and Revision in "Freya of the Seven Isles"'; Jeremy Hawthorn, 'Conrad and the Erotic: "A Smile of Fortune" and "The Planter of Malata"'; Jennifer Turner, '"Petticoats" and "Sea Business": Women Characters in Conrad's Edwardian Short Stories.'"

     Nesrin Eruysal and Bengu Taskesen, eds. Joseph Conrad and His Work: The 10th METU British Novelists Seminar Proceedings 19-20 December 2002. Department of Foreign Language Education at Middle East Technical University, 2004.

     Francois Gallix and Sylvere Monod, ed. Lord Jim Day at the Sorbonne. Mallard Editions, 2004.

"This book is a complete transcription of a conference about Lord Jim organized by the centre of research ERCLA (Francois Gallix and Vanessa Guignery) held at the Sorbonne on 6 December 2003. The conference proceedings include: Francois Gallix, 'Foreword'; Zdzislaw Najder, 'Lord Jim, The Gunboat Lieutenant and Other French Connections'; 'Round Table' (Sylvere Monod, Zdzislaw Najder, J. H. Stape, Claudine Lesage, Josiane Paccaud-Huguet); 'Questions from the Audience'; Marlene Junius, 'Appendix: Shanties'; Francois Gallix and Sylvere Monod, 'Bibliography.'"

     Carola Kaplan, Peter Lancelot Mallios, Andrea White, eds. Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives. Routledge, 2004.

"Conrad in the Twenty-First Century is a collection of original essays by Conrad scholars that rereads Conrad in light of his representations of post-colonialism, of empire, imperialism, and of modernism and modernity-questions that are once again relevant today. The collection is framed by an introduction by J. Hillis Miller and a concluding interview with Edward W. Said. Conrad's work has taken on a new importance in the dawning of the 21st century: in the wake of September 11th 2001, many cultural commentators returned to his novel The Secret Agent to discuss the roots of terrorism, and the overarching theme of colonialism in much of his work has positioned his writing as central to not only literature scholars, but also to postcolonial and cultural studies scholars and, more recently, to scholars interested in globalization. Conrad in the Twenty-First Century looks at Conrad in a variety of fields including literary studies, cultural studies, ethnic and area studies, and post-colonial studies."

     Gene M. Moore, ed. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: A Casebook. Oxford University Press, 2004.

"Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's fictional account of a journey up the Congo river in 1890, raises important questions about colonialism and narrative theory. This casebook contains materials relevant to a deeper understanding of the origins and reception of this controversial text, including Conrad's own story 'An Outpost of Progress,' together with a little-known memoir by one of Conrad's oldest English friends, a brief history of the Congo Free State by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and a parody of Conrad by Max Beerbohm. A wide range of theoretical approaches are also represented, examining Conrad's text in terms of cultural, historical, textual, stylistic, narratological, post-colonial, feminist, and reader-response criticism. The volume concludes with an interview in which Conrad compares his adventures on the Congo with Mark Twain's experiences as a Mississippi pilot."

     Stephen Ross. Conrad and Empire. University of Missouri Press, 2004.

"In Conrad and Empire, Stephen Ross challenges the orthodoxy of the last thirty years of Conrad criticism by arguing that to focus on issues of race and imperialism in Conrad's work is to miss the larger and more important engagement with developing globalization undertaken there. Drawing on the conceptual model provided by Arjun Appadurai and by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Ross maintains that Conrad's major novels confront an emergent new world order that replaces nation-state-based models of geopolitics with the global rule of capitalism, and shows how Conrad supplements this conceptualization by tracing the concrete effects such a change on the psyches of individual subjects. Borrowing from Slavoj Zizek and Jacques Lacan, Ross contends that Conrad's major novels present us with an astute vision of a truly global world order. Devoting a chapter to each novel, Ross analyzes Heart of Darkness", Lord Jim, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent to expose their social vision, their concern with individual experience, and their philosophical synthesis of the two.  After showing how Conrad sets the stage, Ross considers selected characters' personal histories and the family romances by which Conrad sheds light on individual characters' motives, exposing the penetration of ideological forces into personal lives. He then shows how the drama of slave morality in each of the novels synthesizes their critique of social organization and their attention to personal history by revealing how each novel follows an individual character's doomed attempt to transcend the totalizing dimensions of Empire. Ross argues that though postcolonial criticisms of Conrad's work have produced excellent insights, they remain inadequate to understanding its complexity. Instead, he suggests that Conrad's novels should be read for their compellingly prescient vision of a postnational world under the sway of global capitalism. Although Conrad's vision of that world is undeniably bleak, Ross believes, his almost willful reaffirmation of the very values he has shown to be bankrupt constitutes a 'weak idealism.' Consequently, Ross argues, Conrad's fiction is profoundly ethical and pertinent to the pressing project of how to live in a bewilderingly variable world."

     Ray Stevens. Two Last Essays: "Whither Conrad and 'Legends'?, A Textual History of Conrad's Last Essay" & "Homo Neanderthalensis, Mencken, Monkeys and Bible Belt Buckles." Minuteman Press, 2004.

      David Adams. Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel. Cornell University Press, 2003.

"Works such as Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, 'Karain,' Nostromo, The Voyage Out, A Passage to India, and A Handful of Dust explore the relationship between Britain and its colonies when the British Empire was at its height. Adams observes that, because of their structure and specific literary allusions, they also demand to be read in relation to the epic tradition. The underlying concerns of these narratives, Adams discovers, are often less political or literary than metaphysical: in each of these fictions a major character dies as a result of the journey, inviting reflection on the negation of existence. Repeatedly, imaginative encounters with distant, uncanny colonies produce familiar, insular presentations of life as an odyssey, with death as the home port."

     Harold Bloom, ed. Bloom's BioCritiques: Joseph Conrad. Chelsea House, 2003.

"This book is a combination of biography and criticism and serves as an introduction to both the life and works of Conrad. It includes an introduction by Bloom, a biographical essay by Amy Sickels, an introduction to Conrad's works by Richard Ruppel, and essays by Carola M. Kaplan on Heart of Darkness, David Allen Ward on Nostromo, and Tracy Seeley on Lord Jim."

"The thirteen essays in Inter-Relations: Conrad, James, Ford and Others offer contemporary perspectives on the literary relationships between Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Ford Madox Ford, particularly their methodological approaches and how these approaches influenced the artistic growth of Joseph Conrad. The essays address a broad spectrum of themes, from language and narrative technique to impressionism and issues of gender; from techniques of autobiography to those of psychology and creative personality; and from fact vs. fiction studies to those concerned with the contact/clash of cultures, motifs of suicide and death, and the city in literature. Essays include Max Saunders, 'Reflections on Impressionist Autobiography: James, Conrad and Ford'; Jed Rasula, '"Vessels of Consciousness": The Reader's Place in Literary Impressionism'; Caroline Patey, 'Londonscapes: Urban Anxieties and Urban Aesthetics in James, Ford and Conrad'; Robert Hampson, 'Gossip in Conrad, James and Ford'; Michael A. Lucas, 'Ford's Truth about Talk: Conversation in James, Conrad and Ford'; Martin Bock, 'Secret Sharing: Conrad, Ford and Neurasthenia'; Joseph Wiesenfarth, 'Approaching Ford Madox Ford's Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance'; Vita Fortunati, 'Biography and Fiction in Ford's Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance'; Paul Skinner, '"Not the Stuff to Fill Graveyards": Joseph Conrad and Parade's End'; Anthony Fothergill, '"For to End Yet Again": Suicide in the Stories of Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford'; Keith Carabine, '"Where to?": A Comparison of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Conrad's Under Western Eyes'; Merry M. Pawlowski, 'Landscape Painting: Gender and the Production of Cultural Space in Conrad, James and Woolf'; and Jacques Berthoud, 'Convergent Cultures in Early Modernist Novellas.'"

     Mario Curreli, ed. Hans van Marle and Ian Watt, Conradians: A Tribute from Friends. The Joseph Conrad Society (UK), 2003.

"This pamphlet is a tribute to Hans van Marle and Ian Watt. Essays include Constant Boesen, 'The Life of Hans van Marle'; Mario Curreli, 'The Life of Ian Watt'; Mario Curreli, 'Hans and Ian's Legacy'; Christopher GoGwilt, 'Reminiscences of Hans van Marle'; Robert Hampson, 'Hans van Marle'; Peter Mallios, 'Remembering Ian Watt and Hans van Marle'; Sylvere Monod, 'Personal Records: Ian Watt and Hans van Marle'; Gene M. Moore, 'Remembering Two Friends'; Zdzislaw Najder, 'Remembering Two Friends'; Allan H. Simmons, 'Hans van Marle: A Reflection'; J. H. Stape, 'Remembering Hans'; Cedric Watts, 'Recollections of Hans van Marle and Ian Watt.'"

     Lissa Schneider. Conrad's Narratives of Difference: Not Exactly Tales for Boys. Routledge, 2003.

"Though Conrad's works are notorious for the absence or dearth of female characters, this book demonstrates that Conrad often represented women and femininity in fugitive ways.  Arguing that gender and difference are conceptual and performative, Schneider examines many of Conrad's best-known fictions attempts to show how his use of female allegorical imagery, oppositional narrative strategies, and hybrid generic structures challenge late Victorian ideologic (and generic) norms and goals.  Schneider's analysis attempts to illustrate how Conrad's characters negotiate the 'shadow-line' of Victorian paradigms of gender, race, and class to clear a space for a modern revisioning of difference." 

     David Bell, ed. Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the "Narcissus": A Dialogue Seminar. Mid-Sweden University College, 2002.

"Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the "Narcissus" has a reputation for complexity of narrative technique and the ambiguity and uncertainty of its meaning. The Dialogue Seminar held in Ostersund in 1997 with academics from Sweden, Britain, Norway, and Finland explored a number of approaches to these problems from the perspectives of contemporary literary theories.  Post-colonial, post-modern and genre analyses help to explore the issues of power and its subversion in various readings of the novella. This volume includes four of the papers presented at the seminar with an introduction. Essays include: David Bell, 'Introduction: Voyage to the Shades'; Jeremy Hawthorn, 'Narcissism, Seeing and Imperialism: Narrative Technique and the Ideology in The Nigger of the "Narcissus"'; John Crompton, '"From afar I saw them discoursing": Language and "the latent feeling of fellowship" in The Nigger of the "Narcissus"'; Gerald Porter, '"You wouldn't call me nigger if I wasn't half dead": Challenging Hierarchies in The Nigger of the "Narcissus"'; Mark Troy, '"To make you see": Society and Narrative Strategies in The Nigger of the "Narcissus."'"

     Martin Bock. Joseph Conrad and Psychological Medicine. Texas Tech University Press, 2002.

"Conrad's life and fiction are often read through the lens of Freudian thought, though Conrad understood his own health from a pre-Freudian perspective. This book recovers that perspective, revises our understanding of Conrad life, and rethinks the dominant themes of his work in light of pre-Freudian medical psychology. Beginning with a social history of late-nineteenth-century medical psychology and hysteria studies, Bock's study presents a synopsis of fin-de-siecle theories of nervous disorder and moral insanity, tries to show how Conrad's doctors were trained in medical theories that privilege the physiological over the psychological, and describes what Conrad endured during his water cures as Champel-les-Bains and in an English culture that constructed nervous disease--particularly his diagnosed neurasthenia--as a feminine disorder. This book reads Conrad's fiction medically, showing how Conrad's work focuses on such narrative strategies as Conrad's rhetoric of hysteria and enervation and his vivid, nervous descriptions, and it shows how major tropes such as restraint, seclusion, and water--all treatments for insanity--were important issues in the medical discourse of Conrad's day and are themes that ru through Conrad's fiction."

"At once a literary-philosophical meditation on the question of modernity and a manifesto for a new form of literary criticism, Modernity at Sea argues that the nineteenth-century sea narrative played a crucial role in the emergence of a theory of modernity as permanent crisis. In a series of close readings of such works as Melville's White-Jacket and Moby Dick, Conrad's The Nigger of the 'Narcissus,' and 'The Secret Sharer,' and Marx's Grundrisse, Cesare Casarino draws upon the thought of twentieth-century figures including Giorgio Agamben, Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin, Leo Bersani, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Antonio Negri to characterize the nineteenth-century ship narrative as the epitome of Michel Foucault's 'heterotopia'--a special type of space that simultaneously represents, inverts, and contests all other spaces in culture. Elaborating Foucault's claim that the ship has been the heterotopia par excellence of Western civilization since the Renaissance, Casarino goes on to argue that the nineteenth-century sea narrative froze the world of the ship just before its disappearance-thereby capturing at once its apogee and its end, and producing the ship as the matrix of modernity."

"Recent literary and cultural criticism has taken a spatial turn. Nowadays, to speak is to speak from, to, or in; to know something is to have 'mapped' its discursive operation. This book locates this development within the opposition between a space of things and a space of words, tracing aspects of its emergence from the geopolitical idea of 'closed space' which developed in the early 20th century to the influence of Saussurean linguistics in contemporary criticism and theory. Focusing on the work of Conrad, in whom the opposition between a space of words and a space of things is strikingly figured. This book deals with several versions of closed space, using an ancient spatial paradox of God to raise questions about the relations between geography, language, and interpretation.  It also deals with the agitation around finitude and the limit, and the desperate attempt to discover in the resources of language a means of liberation.  Among the figures drawn into dialogue with Conrad are John Buchan, Woolf, Joyce, Peter Kropotkin, Rene de Saussure (brother of the famous Ferdinand), Henri Bergson, the filmmakers George Melies and Carol Reed and, in particular, Michel Foucault, whose anxious negotiation with spatial ideas touches the book's deepest understanding."

"This volume presents all known Conrad letters from the years 1917 to 1919 in a framework which highlights their literary, historical, cultural, and biographical significance. Like its predecessors, this volume includes a high proportion of previously unpublished letters, and many of those already published have appeared only in small-circulation journals. Again like its predecessors, this volume is full of surprises that require us to re-mould our understanding of Conrad's writings. His correspondence reveals his state of mind as he and his family dealt with the anxieties of the war time years, and the return to a fragile peace. During this time, Conrad published The Shadow-Line, The Arrow of Gold, and The Rescue, along with a considerable amount of shorter works, and was preparing for the publication of his collected works on both sides of the Atlantic, and was engaged in a critical  rereading of his earlier books."

"In this re-evaluation of the writings of Conrad, Greaney places language and narrative at the heart of his literary achievement. As a trilingual Polish expatriate, Conrad brought a formidable linguistic self-consciousness to the English novel; tensions between speech and writing are the defining obsessions of his career. He sought very early on to develop a 'writing of the voice' based on oral or communal modes of storytelling.  Greaney argues that the 'yarns' of his nautical raconteur Marlow are the most challenging expression of his voice-centered aesthetic.  But Conrad's suspicion that words are fundamentally untrustworthy is present in everything he wrote. The political novels of his middle period represent a breakthrough from traditional storytelling into the writerly aesthetic of high modernism. Greaney examines a wide range of Conrad's work, combining recent critical approaches to language in post-structuralism with an impressive command of linguistic theory."

"Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' and 'The Secret Sharer' are among the most taught and studied works of 20th-century British fiction. Noted for their psychological depth and stylistic artistry, the two stories have been celebrated as exemplars of modernism. They have also given rise to controversy. Scholars have debated whether 'Heart of Darkness' is a critique of British imperialism or a paean to it. In 1975, Chinua Achebe condemned the novella's author as racist, a charge that has provoked much discussion. Part 1, 'Materials,' gives editions, criticism, and resources available to the instructor of these two complex texts. Part 2, 'Approaches,' contains essays that treat historical contexts, such as slavery and the ivory trade in the Congo of the 1890s; examine literary issues, such as Conrad's use of the unreliable narrator; discuss the place of gender and race in the stories; tell of students' responses in a variety of public and private institutions; and explore specific pedagogical methods, including the use of films such as Coppola's Apocalypse Now in the classroom."

"A multidisciplinary and international collection of essays, this volume contains contributions by writers from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden, and South Africa. They employ a variety of methodological approaches, from detailed archival scholarship to theoretical perspectives on textuality and discursivity. Topics include the development of narrative voice in Heart of Darkness; the relationship between fictionality and missionary discourse; the notion of race in Conrad's work; and Heart of Darkness in contemporary classroom practice in European and South African contexts."

"In stressing the loss of the spiritual tradition in western culture as well as the supremacy of biology over theology and aesthetics over ethics, Conrad's work belongs to the modernist movement which Nietzsche's sceptical philosophy helped to usher in. As this comparative study seeks to show, however, the affinities and parallels between texts such as Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy are so numerous and run so deep, that it is difficult to dismiss them as the product of the late-19th Century zeitgeist which their authors shared. Like Nietzsche's revolutionary piece of literary criticism, Heart of Darkness employs the Apollo-Dionysus opposition as its basic structuring principle while offering a critique of European civilization from a vitalist-primitivist perspective. Moreover, both works anticipate the conjunction of anthropological and literary concerns in 20th Century fiction by suggesting that the roots of human culture  lie  in primitive religious rites celebrating the regenerative forces in nature. Conrad 's novella is seen to dramatize the idea explored in The Birth of Tragedy that the genre sprang from the Bacchic rites which culminate in the sacrifice and consumption of the god Dionysus by his intoxicated followers, symbolizing the shattering and reintegration of the original Unity. Heart of Darkness can therefore be said to reflect what Nietzsche called 'tragedy's doctrine of the mysteries' which consists of 'the fundamental knowledge of the unity of all that exists, the consideration of individuation as the original cause of evil, [and] art as the presentiment of a restored unity.' Thus, for Conrad as for Nietzsche, art takes the place of religion as the 'real metaphysical activity of man' having the power to redeem existence through myth rather than morality, while the restoration of the tragic framework which presupposes a coherent and meaningful universe is seen to be of vital importance for modern man, lost as he is in absurdity and doubt."

"This book is an analytical study of the eternal clash between illusion and reality in the works of Conrad. Seeing through the hypocrisy of the Western world, Conrad was able to project through fictional themes his experience, that behind the ideal of spreading Christianity and European civilization there lay the power-hungry materialism of the West. This study attempts to establish that through his pre-occupation with the profound problem of evil Conrad uncovers the varied forms and facets of evil in humanity, in society, in nature, and in the universe, tracing at great length the moral repercussions of the discovery of evil in all these forms. More specifically, this study attempts to explore Conrad's vision of the ideal, placing it against his concept of reality. Berzenji argues that critics have hinted at this vision but few have attempted to analyse it in detail, focusing only on those of his major works that embody this vision in which he has tried to depict the human predicament confronting the reality-ideal tension. Berzenji first tries to define this concept from its earliest formulation by Plato and then traces its development to modern times, placing Conrad's vision in this context. Berzenji then deals with the psycho-political depiction of men who set sail for Utopia but were turned back by disaster and futility. In other words the Europeans saw the colonization of Africa as ultimately bringing good to the natives. Conrad, however, was aware that behind the idealized task of spreading Christianity and European civilization there lay the reality of a base, cunning and power-hungry materialism. Berzenji goes on to consider the conflict between an individual's misty ideals and the harsher aspects of reality: the oppressive facets of society, the destructive elements of nature and the darker psychological forces of human nature all of which bear down on an idealistic nature. Berzenji concludes by attempting to define Conrad's own vision of idealism and how it is mirrored various of his works."

"This research and study guide is an introduction to critical analysis of a selection of Conrad's short stories. This book covers four short works (Heart of Darkness, 'Typhoon,' 'The Secret Sharer,' and The Shadow-Line), offering a variety of viewpoints by different critics on important aspects of each work. This volume also includes a biography of Conrad, a summary of each story's plot, a listing of additional critical works about the stories, a complete bibliography of Conrad's work, and an index of important themes and ideas."

     Gail Fincham and Attie M. de Lange with Wieslaw Krajka, eds. Conrad at the Millennium: Modernism, Postmodernism, Postcolonialism. Social Science Monographs, 2001.

"This collection is international and interdisciplinary in scope drawing on a large range of theoretical perspectives ranging from archival scholarship to cultural geography and film studies. There are four sections: Modernism and Modernity; Postmodernism: Intertextuality; Postmodernism: Gaze, Vision and Voice; and Postcolonialism."

     Andrew Mozina. Joseph Conrad and the Art of Sacrifice: The Evolution of the Scapegoat Theme in Joseph Conrad's Fiction. Routledge, 2001.

"This book explores the importance of sacrifice in Conrad's major fiction, both as a theme and in Conrad's stance as a writer, showing how his biography, politics, and literary background shaped his treatment of the problem."

"In this book, Peters investigates the impact of Impressionism on Conrad and links this to his literary techniques as well as his philosophical and political views. Impressionism, Peters argues, enabled Conrad to encompass both surface and depth not only in visually perceived phenomena but also in his narratives and objects of consciousness, be they physical objects, human subjects, events or ideas. Though Conrad was thought of as a sceptical writer, Peters suggests that through Impressionism he developed a coherent and mostly traditional view of ethical and political principles, a claim he attempts to support through reference to a broad range of Conrad's texts. Conrad and Impressionism investigates the sources and implications of Conrad's impressionism in order to argue for a consistent link among his literary technique, philosophical presuppositions and socio-political views. The same core ideas concerning the nature of human experience run throughout his works."

"Rereading Conrad attempts to shed new light on an author who has spoken to readers for over a century. Schwarz's essays take account of recent developments in theory and cultural studies, including postcolonial, feminist, gay, and ecological perspectives, and show how reading Conrad has changed in the face of the theoretical explosion that has occurred over the past two decades. Schwarz assembles his work from over the past two decades into one volume, reexamining a seminal figure who continues to be a major focus in the twenty-first century. Schwarz touches on virtually all of Conrad's works, including his masterworks and the later, relatively neglected fiction."

"In this study, Dryden places four of his early Malay tales in the context of the literature of imperial romance and adventure that was enjoying great popularity when Conrad began his literary career. Conrad's early Malay fiction reflects his seafaring experiences in the East and expresses his misgivings about the assumptions of 'white superiority,' of imperial power, and of the possibilities for romantic heroism that characterize the late nineteenth-century imperial romance. In fact Conrad was deeply sceptical about its promises of wealth, glory, and heroic reputation. Dryden explores how Conrad used and subverted these tales of Empire to offer an unsettling vision of the imperial experience in Malaya. In Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, Conrad challenges the romantic aspirations of his characters; in 'Karain' he deliberately exploits the formula of imperial romance; and in Lord Jim he exposes the fragility of the notion of romantic heroism and gentlemanly conduct. Using illustrations from and references to many well-known novels of Empire, such as Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain, Dryden demonstrates how Conrad's early 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, in recent years it has been repeatedly denounced as racist and imperialist. Firchow attempts to counter these claims. His response is meant to allow 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 reminds the reader that Heart of Darkness is a novel rather than a sociological treatise and argues that 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 trying to reveal what they distort, misconstrue, or fail to take into account. Firchow uses the 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."

    Robert Hampson. Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad's Malay Fiction. Palgrave, 2000.

"This book examines Conrad's Malay fiction and focuses on cross-cultural encounters, cultural identity and cultural dislocation in Conrad's Malay fiction , paying particular attention to issues of 'race' and gender. It also situations Conrad's writings about Malaysia in relation to earlier English accounts of the archipelago.  It considers work by Mundy, Keppel, Wallace and Clifford, which Conrad had read, as well as exploring the discursive formation within which that work was produced.  At the same time, it also indicates something of the region's history of cross-cultural encounters.  This books draws on new historicism, as well as postcolonial and postmodern theory, to explore the central problem that Conrad addressed in his fiction: how to represent another culture."

"This volume is the first comprehensive and authoritative reference to distill in a lively, readable way a vast range of information on Conrad's life, works, reputation, and the historical and cultural contexts in which he lived. There are entries on all of Conrad's works, the people he knew, places he visited, and also on such topics as dictation, health, operas, ships, and various schools of Conrad scholarship. Much of the material in the Companion is entirely new, compiled from scattered Conrad resources, many of which have never been published before. The authors, together with a small team of specialist contributors, have brought together the latest findings of modern scholarship to provide an unparalleled resource for all Conrad enthusiasts, one which summarizes and makes available in convenient form the results of the first century of Conrad studies."

"Why did Joseph Conrad avoid using English, except when it came to the arduous task of writing fiction? And how do we account for his extensive 'borrowing' from French writers? This psycholinguistic examination delves into the creative mind of Conrad in an attempt to decipher his learning and use of three languages, Polish, French, and English. Following a trail of syntactical eccentricities and considerable stylistic variations, Lucas shows how these features interact to produce Conrad's idiosyncratic style."

"This volume makes available a variety of texts by Conrad's friends and contemporaries, ranging from a sailing memoir by his oldest English friend to a dramatic adaptation of his novel Victory, and from his secretary's notebook to his last will and testament. Often mentioned or cited by scholars, these texts are here published in full for the first time. They also reveal Conrad speaking 'between the lines' in various voices, and raise theoretical questions about the social nature of authorship and the construction of authorial canons. Essays include G. F. W. Hope, 'Friend of Conrad'; 'The "Knopf Document": Transcriptions and Commentary'; Basil MacDonald Hastings, 'Victory'; Wilfred Partington, 'Joseph Conrad Behind the Scenes'; Richard Curle, 'The History of Mr. Conrad's Books'; L. M. Hallowes, 'Note Book of Joseph Conrad'; 'Conrad's Last Will and Testament.'"

"This study offers a radical rereading of Conrad's work in light of contemporary theories of masculinity. Drawing on feminism, gay studies, film theory and literary theory, the author shows that Conrad's fiction, even as it reflects certain assumptions of its day about gender roles, offers inquiries into the instability of the 'masculine.' The book explores the relationship masculinity with imperialism, modernity, the visual and the body in a wide range of Conrad's less-known fiction."

"Lord Jim: Centennial Essays features eight essays by Conrad scholars to celebrate the centenary of the publication of what is possibly Conrad's best-known novel. This carefully edited volume covers a wide range of topics, and includes new work on the novel's reception and sources, narrative strategies, and thematic interests. Various contemporary critical approaches--Bakhtinian, postcolonial, and historicist--are aired and reconsidered, and a generous selection of documents relating to the Jeddah affair of 1880 sheds light on Conrad's use of real-life materials. The kaleidoscopic perspectives brought to bear on this landmark of literary Modernism is meant to stimulate and challenge both scholars and students alike."

"Watt has long been acknowledged as one of the finest of postwar literary critics, and among the most learned of those writing about the work of Conrad. Essays on Conrad is a collection of Watt's most characteristic essays on Conrad's work. Watt's own philosophy, as well as his insight into Conrad's work, was shaped by his experiences as a prisoner of war on the River Kwai. His account of these experiences completes this essential collection of Watt essays."

"Ash develops a theoretical framework for interpreting Conrad's signal texts and his situation as an author. Using relational psychoanalysis, Ashe reinserts into the literary conversation the idea of the psychologically inflected subject.  She integrates authorial and fictional subjectivity with specific historical contexts, thus lending agency and density to the 'relational subject' without neglecting the social forces which shape it. Organized around the thematics of unfinished mourning, this book carefully positions Conrad  as a writer caught 'in between,' as both a figure of alienation disenchanted with British imperialism, and an orphan of genius desiring a fit with his adopted culture. Through readings of Conrad's novels and broad analyses of psychoanalytic and modernist criticisms, Ash attempts to refocus how one reads Conrad and re-theorize the subject and its literary relations."

"Heralds of the Postmodern inquires into the possibility of a poetics of madness in Heart of Darkness, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Golden Notebook. By relating the literary expression of the irrational in these works to the philosophical attempt to overcome the subject and rationality in the writings of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida, the book presents modern fiction as an arena in which struggles between reason and madness, limitation and transgression, 'self' and 'other' are fully displayed. It investigates how modern literature subverts traditional metaphysics by exploring the realm of the other reason and the new forms of subjectivity."

"This study engages with the troubled question of authorial subjectivity and ethics in Modernism in general and in Conrad's short fiction in particular, and offers a theoretical perspective, inspired by the work of Derrida and the early philosophical writings of M. M. Bakhtin. Part I of the book focuses on the relational dynamics of Under Western Eyes and 'The Secret Sharer' and develops a 'heterobiographical' reading matrix which serves as a psycho-textual and philosophical approach to modes of authorial presence in the text. Part II offers close readings of ten short stories spanning the whole of Conrad's career and clustered into five chapter--'Writing and Fratricide,' 'The Pathos of Authenticity,' 'The Poetics of Cultural Despair,' 'The Romantic Paradox,' and 'Addressing the Woman.' This part of the book engages with the interpretative problems posed by these stories through a cultural-historical perspective, linking Conrad's essentially Romantic sensibility and his unique position on the threshold of Modernism with some of the issues that have emerged from the 'Postmodern turn': the relationship between metaphysics and subjectivity, the conception of inter-subjectivity as prior to and constitutive of subjectivity; the permeability of textual and psychological boundary-lines; and the desire for subjective aesthetization. These issues which can all be traced back to the cultural crisis of the turn of the century, are still with us at the close of the millennium."

"Polish-born Joseph Conrad is widely considered to be one of the finest masters of the English language. His life at sea and in foreign ports around the world furnished most of the material for his books, which include Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, and perhaps his best-known story, 'Heart of Darkness.' This illustrated volume provides a look at this complex author and draws materials from the British Library's collection of literary manuscripts and many other sources to narrate the background to Conrad's early family life, his voyages and later years as a writer in England."

"This book attempts a socio-philosophic evaluation of Conrad as a novelist by a systematic and close examination of the relationship between the individual and the world around him, in his fiction. It presents Conrad, not as a pessimist or a nihilist, but as a positive philosopher having infinite faith in human existence. Girdhari argues that Conrad's novels mark a pattern of 'evolution' of the mind of an individual from personal to social awareness. The purpose of this book is to view the growth of this process in the perspective of the inner consciousness of Conrad's protagonists in response to the outside world of human relationships. Girdhari argues that loneliness, for Conrad, poses a serious threat to human existence.  Consequently, his protagonists open up into the world outside in order tin interact with the species of their kind. According to Girdhari, an individual, in isolation, cannot survive without relating oneself to other members and institutions of the society. One has to emerge out of oneself and rise to a level of perfection through love, compassion and sacrifice. It is the attainment of this state that eventually gives one a sense of fulfillment and a joy of salvation, and thus Conrad had a deep trust in the ultimate value of human relationships."

"Supported by an enduring critical paradigm, the traditional account of Conrad's career privileges his public image as a man of the sea, addressing himself to a male audience and male concerns. This book challenges received assumptions by recovering Conrad's relationship to women not only in his life but in his fiction and among his readers. The existing interplay of criticism, biography, and marketing has contributed to a masculinist image associated with a narrow body of modernist texts. Instead, Jones attempts to reinstate the female influences arising from hs early Polish life and culture; his friendship with the French writer Marguerite Poradowska; his engagement with popular women's writing; and his experimentation with visuality as his later work appears in the visual contexts of 'women's pages' of popular journals. By foregrounding less familiar novels such as Chance and the neglected Suspense, she emphasises the range and continuity of Conrad's concerns, showing that his later discussions of gender and genre often originate in the period of the 'great' sea tales. Conrad also emerges as an acute reader and critic of popular forms, while his unexpected entry into important contemporary debates about female identity invites us to rethink the nature of his contribution to modernism."

"A collection of essays written by Conrad scholars from all corners of the world, this book deals with (1) Joseph Conrad's East European and Polish contexts and (2) Joseph Conrad's imperial and American contexts, as well as selected ethical-philosophical and textological-narrative issues. A wide spectrum of themes and aspects of the literary output of Joseph Conrad is addressed as well: from ethical issues to mythical organization of Conradian universe, from analysis of the method of narration to textological studies, from parallels with Whitman and Turgenev to the influence of Dostoevsky and of Polish romantic literature, from post-Freudian to feminist Dutch literature on Indonesia to examination in terms of Indian philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, from mythical anthropological readings of the influence of Polish ethnos and culture to application of elements of Jewish folklore."

"Conrad  is one of the most widely taught writers in the English language. In addition to his novels, he wrote several pieces of short fiction, essays, and memoirs. He also wrote numerous letters, which help shed light on his troubled life and career. This reference book is a guide to the entire body of his writings and to the experiences that helped generate them. A biographical chapter discusses research on Conrad's life and tells the story of his birth in a Ukrainian area of Poland under Czarist Russian rule, his sea career in France and England, his travels throughout Asia, South America, and Africa, and his maturation as a writer. The chapters that follow are written by contributors who explore each of his major works in detail. Other chapters explore his voluminous correspondence, his later novels, his short fiction, and other writings. Thus the volume provides those new to Conrad with essential biographical, bibliographical, and contextual information, while it simultaneously offers experienced readers of Conrad new critical perspectives."

"This anthology starts with a short biographical sketch of Conrad, followed by nineteen essays that assess his themes, short works, and later novels. Each one begins with a brief summation of its main ideas and the writer's background; the readable texts average five  pages in length and are broken up by subheadings. Selections represent a range of viewpoints from confirmed Conrad scholars Cedric Watts and Morton Zabel, to more contemporary experts such as Gene Phillips, who compares the film Apocalypse Now to Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, on which it was based."

"Spanning a range of interpretations, the critical works in this collection analyze the complex narrative technique of Heart Of Darkness while exploring its evocation of myth, philosophy, and politics, its attitudes to empire, its images of Africa, and its representations of women. Examining secondary sources from the 1900's to the 1990's, this guide is a resource for the study of one of Conrad's most potent works."

"The volume, comprising seventeen contributions by students of Conrad and James, focuses on their similarities and differences: as men and writers, and on reciprocal literary and cultural influences. Essays also include commentaries on Conrad's literary relationship with such other writers as Stevenson, Flaubert, and Melville"

This volume presents studies of Conrad's work at the close of his first century and points toward new directions in Conrad scholarship for the next century. The essays pursue biographical, linguistic, formalist, socio-historical, and theoretical approaches and comment on a great number of fiction and non-fiction works from Conrad's extensive canon--including the centennial novel Almayer's Folly and re-visions of his writings in fiction and film. New work from established Conrad scholars joins with that of the rising generation to offer a full range of perspectives on the breadth of Conrad's culture and art.

"This collection of essays about Conrad and theory includes the following essays: Robert Hampson, 'Introduction'; Sandra Dodson, 'Conrad and the Politics of the Sublime'; Anthony Fothergill, 'Signs, Interpolations, Meanings: Conrad and the Politics of Utterance'; Gail Fincham, 'The Dialogism of Lord Jim'; Andrzej Gasiorek, '"To Season with a Pinch of Romance": Ethics and Politics in Lord Jim'; Andrew Gibson, 'Ethics and Unrepresentability in Heart of Darkness'; Carola M. Kaplan, 'No Refuge: The Duplicity of Domestic Safety in Conrad's Fiction'; Josiane Paccaud-Huguet, 'Reading Shadows into Lines: Conrad with Lacan'; and Andrew Michael Roberts, 'Conrad, Theory and Value.'"

"Journeys, Myths and the Age of Travel: Joseph Conrad's Era, edited by Karin Hansson, contains papers given at an international conference organized by the Department of Humanities of the University of Karlskrona/Ronneby, Sweden in September 1997. To academic teachers and students with an interest in colonial or postcolonial studies, Joseph Conrad's writing is central, historically, generically, and symbolically. The studies show how his oeuvre constitutes a common frame of reference internationally and how it relates in various ways to a number of writers, from his contemporaries to those of today. Illustrating the scope and variety of today's criticism, the contributions deal with works from different phases of Conrad's writing career, including his shorter fiction and novels as well as non-fiction."

"This book is a structural and thematic analysis of early modern British fiction whose intellectual foundation is political theory, sociology, and philosophy. Key theoreticians addressed include Charles Darwin, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Karl Mannheim, Karl Marx, Georg Lukacs, and Charles Taylor.  Lord explores the manifestations in narrative structure of epistemological relativism, textual reflexivity, and political inquiry, specifically Conrad's critique of colonialism and imperialism and his concern for the relationship between self and society. The tension between solitude and solidarity manifests itself as a soul divided against itself; an individual torn between engagement and detachment, idealism and cynicism; a dramatized narrator who himself embodies the contradictions between radical individualism and social cohesion; a society that professes the ideal of shared responsibility while isolating the individual guilty of betraying the illusion of cultural or professional solidarity. Conrad's complexity and ambiguity, his conflicting allegiances to the ideal of solidarity versus the terrible insight of unremitting solitude, his grappling with the dilemma of private versus shared meaning, are intrinsic to his political and philosophical thought.  The metanarrative focus of Conrad's texts intensifies rather than diminishes their philosophical and political concerns. formal experimentation and epistemological exploration inevitably entail ethical and social implications.  Lord relates these issues to the dialectic of individual liberty and collective responsibility that lies at the core of the modern moral and political debate."

"Although Schopenhauer's influence on Conrad has been acknowledged for some time, there have been no book-length studies dealing exclusively with this subject, or the much-debated question of Conrad's relationship to Nietzsche. The present study comes to fill this gap in Conrad criticism, and shows how a knowledge of these philosophers' main ideas can help illuminate the central concerns and presuppositions of Conrad's fiction. The author argues that the novelist was often grappling with the same problems as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and responding to some of the key issues of the Idealistic movement in the history of ideas."

"This anthology is a collection of critical essays on the works of Joseph Conrad and highlights their relevance in the contemporary literary scenario. It includes contributions of scholars from India, USA, Germany, Spain, Taiwan and South Africa and is representative of the continued and growing interest in Conradian studies across the world. The collection presents re-readings of Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, Typhoon, Under Western Eyes, The Shadow-Line, Karain: A Memory, and The Partner in a framework of postcolonial, postmodern, feminist, moral and biographical approaches and brings out the multivalency of Conrad's fiction."

"Conrad is a key figure in modernist fiction innovative work engages with many of the crucial philosophical, moral and political concerns of the twentieth century. This collection of critical readings of his work is arranged according to the issues which each critic addresses, issues which are of crucial importance and in many cases remain controversial within contemporary literary theory and criticism. Following an opening section on the critical tradition, indicating how the study of Conrad's work has been politicised since the 1970s, there are sections on 'Narrative, Textuality and Interpretation,' Imperialism,' 'Gender and Sexuality,' Class and Ideology,' and 'Modernity.' Within each section two or three critical excerpts offer contrasting and complementary accounts of the fiction, while the head notes to each piece and the introduction place these excerpts within the wider critical debate, clarifying for the reader both the theoretical issues and the interpretation of Conrad's fiction."

"This anthology provides a resource for students researching Conrad's life and works.  It contains a biography of Conrad, primary and secondary bibliography, a chronology of Conrad's life and career as well as of concurrent historical events.  The essays are taken from a wide variety of sources and include: 'The Prose Writer's Goals and Methods'; Joseph Conrad, 'Conrad Learns His Craft'; Walter F. Wright, 'Major Elements in Conrad's Stories'; Jerry Allen, 'Conrad as Painter'; Adam Gillon, 'Gender Roles in Conrad's Novels'; Cedric Watts, 'Imagination and Character in "Typhoon''; Jeremy Hawthorn, 'Symbolism in "The Secret Sharer"';  J. B. Priestley, 'Heroism in "The Secret Sharer"'; Michael P. Jones, 'Conrad, the Sea, and "The Secret Sharer"'; Morton Dauwen Zabel, 'The Significance of Character in The Nigger of the "Narcissus"'; Maxine Greene, 'The Significance of the Crew in The Nigger of the "Narcissus"'; James E. Miller, Jr., 'The Ambiguous Beginning of "Heart of Darkness"'; Richard Adams, 'Marlow's Role in "Heart of Darkness"'; Daniel R. Schwarz, 'Africans in "Heart of Darkness"'; Harold R. Collins, 'Apocalypse Now: A Film Version of "Heart of Darkness"'; Gene D. Phillips, 'The Complex Morality of Lord Jim'; R. A. Gekoski, 'Imperialism and Capitalism in Nostromo'; Robert Penn Warren, 'Irony in The Secret Agent'; and E. M. W. Tillyard, 'Symbolic Characters in Victory.'"

"Beginning with a detailed discussion of Conrad's ambivalence toward the function of language and the meaning of fiction, Billy explores the problematical sense of an ending in Conrad's tales and novellas. Billy tries to demonstrate 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.  Hence, Billy argues, Conrad's artistic endgames celebrate indeterminacy and uncertainty--both in life and in the fictions we create to give our lives meaning.  Billy also grounds his study of Conrad's paradoxical strategy in a theoretical consideration of how the concept of closure has evolved since the Victorian novel.  Ultimately, Billy maintains, Conrad wrote with tow distinct audiences in mind: the conventional reader who relishes the sustained illusion of a conforting coda, and the more sophisticated reader who would appreciate the clash of contradictory perspectives."

"This book is a comparative analysis of Conrad and Faulkner. Its aim is to resolve one of the basic critical controversies in Conrad and Faulkner, i.e. the discrepancy between the apparent negativity of their fiction and the overt affirmation of their non-fictional utterances. This study identifies the discrepancy as being directly related to the issue of alienation and commitment, which forms the core of Conrad's and Faulkner's novels. The types of alienation and commitment differentiated in this book serve to reconcile the negative and the affirmative in Conrad and Faulkner. In the end, it is the category of 'unconscious commitment' that redeems the apparent negativity of a Conrad or Faulkner novel."

     J. N. Lockman. Parallel Captures: Lord Jim and Lawrence of Arabia. Falcon Books. 1997.

"This brief monograph considers the parallels of word choice between the capture and escape episode in Conrad's Lord Jim and the capture, torture, and escape episode, otherwise known as the 'Deraa incident' in T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his memoir of the Arab Revolt against the Turks during the First World War."

"Since the f