Joseph Conrad and the Anthropological Dilemma

Joseph Conrad and the Anthropological Dilemma
Author: John Wylie Griffith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 1995
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780198183006

By situating Conrad's work in relation to other writings on 'primitive' peoples, John Griffith shows how his fiction draws on prominent anthropological and biological theories regarding the degenerative potential of contacts between European and other cultures. At the same time, however, Conrad's work reflected an anthropological dilemma: he constantly posed the question of how to bridge conceptual and cultural gaps between various peoples.

Joseph Conrad's Critical Reception

Joseph Conrad's Critical Reception
Author: John G. Peters
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2013-04-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 110703485X

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

Free Will and Determinism in Joseph Conrad’s Major Novels

Free Will and Determinism in Joseph Conrad’s Major Novels
Author: Ludwig Schnauder
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9042026170

Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Free Will and Determinism: A Philosophical Introduction -- Free Will and Determinism in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Britain -- Conrad and the Problem of Free Will -- Heart of Darkness and the Empire Machine -- Nostromo and the Mechanics of History -- The Secret Agent and the Urban Jungle -- Conclusion -- Works Cited.

A Historical Guide to Joseph Conrad

A Historical Guide to Joseph Conrad
Author: John Peters
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2010
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0195332784

Joseph Conrad achieved worldwide literary renown in his third language. Despite not having learned English until his twenties, Conrad succeeded in breaking new ground with his portrayal of anti-heroes & distinctive narrative style, becoming a major influence on 20th century English language fiction.

Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture

Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture
Author: S. Donovan
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2005-09-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230513778

This highly original study opens up a new dimension to Joseph Conrad by revealing his lifelong fascination with the popular culture of his day. Drawing on original archival materials and treating subjects as diverse as Bovril advertising, spirit photography, sea shanties, global tourism, and the new sport of speed-walking, it shows how Conrad's fiction makes a sustained response to early-twentieth-century popular culture and will be of interest to all students, scholars and enthusiasts of Conrad.

Work, Inheritance, and Deserts in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction

Work, Inheritance, and Deserts in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction
Author: Evelyn Tsz Yan Chan
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2022-08-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9811925844

This book focuses on the complex relationships between inheritance, work, and desert in literature. It shows how, from its manifestation in the trope of material inheritance and legacy in Victorian fiction, “inheritance” gradually took on additional, more modern meanings in Joseph Conrad’s fiction on work and self-making. In effect, the emphasis on inheritance as referring to social rank and wealth acquired through birth shifted to a focus on talent, ability, and merit, often expressed through work. The book explores how Conrad’s fiction engaged with these changing modes of inheritance and work, and the resulting claims of desert they led to. Uniquely, it argues that Conrad’s fiction critiques claims of desert arising from both work and inheritance, while also vividly portraying the emotional costs and existential angst that these beliefs in desert entailed. The argument speaks to and illuminates today’s debates on moral desert arising from work and inheritance, in particular from meritocratic ideals. Its new approach to Conrad’s works will appeal to students and scholars of Conrad and literary modernism, as well as a wider audience interested in philosophical and social debates on desert deriving from inheritance and work.

Heart of Darkness (Fourth International Student Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)

Heart of Darkness (Fourth International Student Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)
Author: Joseph Conrad
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2016-04-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0393614719

The Fourth Edition is again based on Robert Kimbrough’s meticulously re-edited text. Missing words have been restored and the entire novel has been repunctuated in accordance with Conrad’s style. The result is the first published version of Heart of Darkness that allows readers to hear Marlow’s voice as Conrad heard it when he wrote the story. "Backgrounds and Contexts" provides readers with a generous collection of maps and photographs that bring the Belgian Congo to life. Textual materials, topically arranged, address nineteenth-century views of imperialism and racism and include autobiographical writings by Conrad on his life in the Congo. New to the Fourth Edition is an excerpt from Adam Hochschild’s recent book, King Leopold’s Ghost, as well as writings on race by Hegel, Darwin, and Galton. "Criticism" includes a wealth of new materials, including nine contemporary reviews and assessments of Conrad and Heart of Darkness and twelve recent essays by Chinua Achebe, Peter Brooks, Daphne Erdinast-Vulcan, Edward Said, and Paul B. Armstrong, among others. Also new to this edition is a section of writings on the connections between Heart of Darkness and the film Apocalypse Now by Louis K. Greiff, Margot Norris, and Lynda J. Dryden. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

Conrad's Shadow

Conrad's Shadow
Author: Nidesh Lawtoo
Publisher: MSU Press
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2016-09-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1628952768

Western thought has often dismissed shadows as fictional, but what if fictions reveal original truths? Drawing on an anti-Platonic tradition in critical theory, Lawtoo adopts ethical, anthropological, and philosophical lenses to offer new readings of Joseph Conrad’s novels and the postcolonial and cinematic works that respond to his oeuvre. He argues that Conrad’s fascination with doubles urges readers to reflect on the two sides of mimesis: one side is dark and pathological, and involves the escalation of violence, contagious epidemics, and catastrophic storms; the other side is luminous and therapeutic, and promotes communal survival, postcolonial reconciliation, and plastic adaptations to changing environments. Once joined, the two sides reveal Conrad as an author whose Janus-faced fictions are powerfully relevant to our contemporary world of global violence and environmental crisis.

Conrad's Eastern Vision

Conrad's Eastern Vision
Author: A. Yeow
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2008-11-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0230583288

This book traces the dialogic relation between Conrad's Eastern fiction and other histories, arguing that it is in the intersections of art and history that we locate Conrad's irony. In a direct response to the visual culture of his times, Conrad sets up his fictional world as a hallucinated mirage stressing the veracity of his own Eastern vision.

The Early Evolutionary Imagination

The Early Evolutionary Imagination
Author: Emelie Jonsson
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2021-09-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030827380

Darwinian evolution is an imaginative problem that has been passed down to us unsolved. It is our most powerful explanation of humanity’s place in nature, but it is also more cognitively demanding and less emotionally satisfying than any myth. From the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, evolution has pushed our capacity for storytelling into overdrive, sparking fairy tales, adventure stories, political allegories, utopias, dystopias, social realist novels, and existential meditations. Though this influence on literature has been widely studied, it has not been explained psychologically. This book argues for the adaptive function of storytelling, integrates traditional humanist scholarship with current knowledge about the evolved and adapted human mind, and calls for literary scholars to reframe their interpretation of the first authors who responded to Darwin.