Nostromo (by Joseph Conrad)

Nostromo is one of the great novels in world literature. It imaginatively recreates the political, economic, and military history of a Latin American country through a remarkable complex of personal stories. Conrad's dazzling switches of viewpoint and chronology ensure that the reader is embroioled in the stress and passion at the core of each moment of his characters' lives.

Best known as the author of Heart of Darkness (1899), Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) 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 thorough 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 expert contributors and 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.

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 of such a change on the psyches of individual subjects. Borrowing from Slavoj Ž iž ek 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, the author 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. The drama of slave morality synthesizes the novels' critique of social organization and their attention to personal history. Ross shows how each novel follows an individual character's doomed attempt to transcend the totalizing dimensions of Empire as it is chronicled by Conrad. Ross claims that though postcolonial criticisms of Conrad's work have produced excellentinsights, their inadequacy to understanding its complexity is no longer avoidable. Instead, Conrad's novels should be read for the compellingly prescient vision they offer of a postnational world under the sway of global ca

Reading Conrad Now is a collection of original essays by leading 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, one of the most important literary critics today, and a concluding extensive interview with Edward Said (one of his final interviews before his death on September 25, 2003), the most prominent postcolonial critic-addressing his lifelong fascination with Conrad. Reading Conrad Now will be essential reading for anyone seeking a contemporary introduction to this great writer, and will be of great interest to scholars working with Conrad in a variety of fields including literary studies, cultural studies, ethnic and area studies, and postcolonial studies.

In this re-evaluation of the writings of Joseph Conrad, Michael 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 and tensions between speech and writing are the defining obsessions of his career. 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.

Wilson analyzes Conrad's multi-level style of writing—a tripartate structure consisting of rendering, or the use of realistic details to present a convincing story; symbol patterns, or allusive details surrounding characters; and a final meaning, or the philosophical abstractions to be educed from his book.