The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad offers a series of essays by leading Conrad scholars aimed at both students and the general reader. There’s a chronology and overview of Conrad’s life, then chapters that explore significant issues in his major writings, and deal in depth with individual works. These are followed by discussions of the special nature of Conrad’s narrative techniques, his complex relationships with late-Victorian imperialism and with literary Modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay provides guidance to further reading, and a concluding chapter surveys the body of Conrad criticism. It evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold!—it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel it ought to embroider—but it goes on knitting. You come and say: "this is all right; it's only a question of the right kind of oil. Let us use this—for instance—celestial oil and the machine shall embroider a most beautiful design in purple and gold." Will it? Alas no. You cannot by any special lubrication make embroidery with a knitting machine. And the most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself; made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart. It is a tragic accident—and it has happened. You can't interfere with it. The last drop of bitterness is in the suspicion that you can't even smash it. In virtue of that truth one and immortal which lurks in the force that made it spring into existence it is what it is—and it is indestructible! Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, Polish: [ˈjuzɛf tɛˈɔdɔr ˈkɔnrat kɔʐɛˈɲɔfskʲi] ⓘ; 3 December 1857– 3 August 1924) was a Polish-British novelist and short story writer. [2] [note 1] He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language; [5] though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he came to be regarded a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. [note 2] He wrote novels and stories, many in nautical settings, that depict crises of human individuality in the midst of what he saw as an indifferent, inscrutable and amoral world. [note 3] Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness, London: Edward Arnold, 1979

To brand Hanna Arendt as a “theoretician of imperialism” sounds absolutely preposterous to me, to say the least. On the other hand, while it does not seem fair to accuse Mr. Conrad with extolling nascent American imperialism in the region, it is true that he has seemingly bestowed upon a distinguished handful of modern novelists and travel-writers his own kind of approach and gaze on the Third World’s grim realities. The location of the novel is Costaguana, a fictional country on the western seaboard of South America, and the focus of events is in its capital Sulaco, where a silver mine has been inherited by English-born Charles Gould but is controlled by American capitalists in San Francisco. Competing military factions plunge the country in a state of civil war, and Gould tries desperately to keep the mine working. Amidst political chaos, he dispatches a huge consignment of silver, putting it into the hands of the eponymous hero, the incorruptible Capataz de Cargadores, Nostromo. Conrad's alienation from partisan politics went together with an abiding sense of the thinking man's burden imposed by his personality, as described in an 1894 letter by Conrad to a relative-by-marriage and fellow author, Marguerite Poradowska ( née Gachet, and cousin of Vincent van Gogh's physician, Paul Gachet) of Brussels: Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes. F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship. Ed. Matthew J. Brucolli with Judith S. Baughman. Columbia: U South Carolina P, 1996. 87.

When the mine becomes a success, the Goulds grow ridiculously powerful and influential in Costaguana politics—yay. However, Charles's hopes regarding encouraging peace and prosperity don't really work out—boo. Basically, immediately after the Goulds help maneuver Don Vincente Ribiera into the position of President/Dictator, rebel forces (led by General Montero, who had previously served as Ribiera's Minister of War) start agitating to overthrow him, and war breaks out. In Conrad’s universe, however, almost no one is incorruptible. The exploit does not bring Nostromo the fame he had hoped for, and he feels slighted and used. Feeling that he has risked his life for nothing, he is consumed by resentment, which leads to his corruption and ultimate destruction, for he had kept secret the true fate of the silver after all others believed it lost at sea, rather than hidden on an offshore island. In recovering the silver for himself, he is shot and killed, mistaken for a trespasser, by the father of his fiancée, the keeper of the lighthouse on the island of Great Isabel. However, things do not go according to plan. It is almost impossible to provide an account of the plot without giving away what are called in movie criticism ‘plot spoilers’. But the silver does not reach its intended destination, and the remainder of the novel is concerned with both the civil conflict and the attitudes of the people who know that the silver exists, and their vainglorious attempts to acquire it.

Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings. Interestingly, Conrad was accused of the latter with Lord Jim and attempted to justify his writing in a preface to one edition. I think he fails but I wonder how much is a case of modern writing having moved on so far away from the classics that we struggle to read them now and how much it is that what was once considered a great story we can now see is really rather shoddy. Clearly, Conrad’s peers struggled with him too so perhaps it isn’t just me/us today? Because I trust your excellence I’ll refrain from dismissing Conrad completely then – I may return to him in the future and bear your recommendations in mind! Any unaware reader of Nostromo might surmise that Conrad actually resided for a long time in some Caribbean Spanish-speaking country during the second half of the 19th century. Yet Nostromo was written by a man whose essential Latin American direct experience was, by his own admission, just a glance, a remote memory of Caribbean scenery and of various people he came across with in his youth. Writing near the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew on the national experiences of his native Poland—during nearly all his life, parceled out among three occupying empires [17] [note 6]—and on his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world—including imperialism and colonialism—and that profoundly explore the human psyche. [19] Postcolonial analysis of Conrad's work has stimulated substantial debate; in 1975, author Chinua Achebe published an article denouncing Heart of Darkness as racist and dehumanising, whereas other scholars, including Adam Hochschild and Peter Edgerly Firchow, have rebutted Achebe's view.Conrad's later letters to literary friends show the attention that he devoted to analysis of style, to individual words and expressions, to the emotional tone of phrases, to the atmosphere created by language. In this, Conrad in his own way followed the example of Gustave Flaubert, notorious for searching days on end for le mot juste—for the right word to render the "essence of the matter." Najder opines: Tensions that originated in his childhood in Poland and increased in his adulthood abroad contributed to Conrad's greatest literary achievements. [43] Zdzisław Najder, himself an emigrant from Poland, observes: The Complete Critical Guide to Joseph Conrad is a good introduction to Conrad criticism. It includes a potted biography, an outline of the stories and novels, and pointers towards the main critical writings – from the early comments by his contemporaries to critics of the present day. Also includes a thorough bibliography which covers biography, criticism in books and articles, plus pointers towards specialist Conrad journals. These guides are very popular. Recommended. cannot act or exist without idealizing every simple feeling, desire, or achievement. He could not believe his own motives if he did not make them first a part of some fairy tale. The earth is not quite good enough for him."