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Conrad Society Awards The Ian P. Watt Prize for Excellence in Conrad Scholarship for 2011 was awarded to Keith Carabine. For over twenty years, Keith Carabine has been a major force guiding and shaping Conrad studies worldwide. His monograph The Life and the Art: A Study of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1996), a genetic study combining complex manuscript history with various biographical, historical, psychological, international, and cross-cultural vectors of analysis, is one of the select major critical texts that has brought the novel Under Western Eyes to the fore of Conrad studies in recent years. His introductions to and editions of, among many texts, the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Nostromo and the Wordsworth edition of Joseph Conrad: Selected Short Stories are widely regarded as models of such scholarship, combining lucid and suggestive insight with judicious selection. Alongside several volumes he has co-edited in the Conrad Eastern and Western Perspectives series, Carabine’s four-volume Conrad: Critical Assessments (Helm Information, 1994) is a landmark, monumental, and permanently enduring resource of Conrad scholarship. Yet his research, nothing short of foundational, is equally matched by the humane guidance and encouragement he has offered—and continues to offer—as a teacher, mentor, and galvanizing figure of the Conradian community. A professor at the University of Kent at Canterbury since 1967 (although he has also held teaching positions in Colorado, Amherst, and Jamaica), Carabine has taught ambitious and influential courses on the British and Russian modern novel, political fiction, and American literature of the 19 th and 20th centuries, and his seminars on Conrad, Faulkner, and Dostoevesky in particular have had influential effects internationally. Chairperson of the Joseph Conrad Society (U.K.) for many years, Carabine has been a key organizer and charismatic force behind Conrad meetings, scholarly projects, and international and multi-generational communities and solidarities worldwide, where he has used his energy and enthusiasm especially to encourage young scholars, fostering a new generation of humane and innovative Conrad scholarship. In short, he may perhaps best be described, to adjust slightly a phrase Conrad used to describe Polish Romantic writer Juliusz Slowacki, as "l’ame de toute la Conradie." There is no sufficient thanking of Keith Carabine for the love he has put into Conrad scholarship and communities of Conradians generally—but this lifetime achievement award honors the sense of humor, the generosity of spirit, the intellectual rigor and tenacity of achievement, that leave us all very fortunate that he is "one of us."The gracious generosity of the late Ruth Watt originally made this award possible. The Adam Gillon Book Award in Conrad Studies 2012 for books published from 2009 through 2011 was presented to three first-place finishers: Peter Lancelot Mallios' s Our Conrad (2010), Richard Niland's Conrad and History (2010), and Michael John DiSanto's Under Conrad's Eyes (2009). Americanists as well as students of Conrad will find Peter Mallios’s Our Conrad invaluable in its analysis of the intersection of literary concerns, history and politics in the shaping of literary judgments – specifically in the early twentieth century construction of Joseph Conrad as “our Conrad.” Deep research and lively writing inform this study that, in Mallios’s own words, attempts to “transnationalize the terms of global and cultural studies.” While historically situating the U.S. reception of Conrad’s texts, Our Conrad demonstrates how the domestic is always saturated by the foreign. Richard Niland’s Conrad and History provides a comprehensive view of the origins and development of Conrad’s engagement with history and its representation in his fiction, his letters, and essays. It examines “the philosophical and historical influences to which Conrad may have been exposed during his life,” carefully considering the cultural climates of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Poland, France, and England that so influenced his thinking about history and its literary representation. Michael John DiSanto’s Under Conrad’s Eyes also explores the roots of Conrad’s writing, especially in nineteenth-century thought. Here DiSanto focuses on Conrad’s reading, examining among his predecessors specifically Carlyle, Dickens, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche and analyzing the manner in which Conrad’s reading of their texts is evidenced in his fictions both as continuation and as argument. The complexity of Conrad’s thought, DiSanto argues, “is rooted in his knowledge of these writers.” In closely examining this relationship, this study also demonstrates how Conrad’s art itself “offers a reassessment of their work.”Honorable Mentions went to Amar Acheraiou's Joseph Conrad and the Reader (2009) and Katherine Isobel Baxter's Joseph Conrad and the Swan Song of Romance (2010). Our congratulations to all those receiving recognition. The competition was particularly stiff. Conrad Society Elections
Conrad Society Business Meetings 2013 Special issue of The Conradian:
Chance: Centennial Essays Details on submitting to the journal are to be found at www.josephconradsociety.org. The Conradian: Subscriptions The Hans van Marle Collection
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