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major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

Joseph Conrad criticism

April 22, 2015 by Roy Johnson

annotated bibliography of criticism and comment

Joseph Conrad criticism is a bibliography of critical comment on Conrad and his works, with details of each publication and a brief description of its contents. The details include active web links to Amazon where you can buy the books, often in a variety of formats – new, used, and as Kindle eBooks. The listings are arranged in alphabetical order of author.

Joseph Conrad criticism

The list includes new books and older publications which may now be considered rare. It also includes print-on-demand or Kindle versions of older texts which are much cheaper than the original. Others (including some new books) are often sold off at rock bottom prices. Whilst compiling these listings I bought a copy of Jeremy Hawthorn’s early study Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness for one penny.

Joseph Conrad and the Reader – Amar Acheraiou, London: Macmillan, 2009. This challenging study proposes new approaches to modern literary criticism and is fully devoted to Conrad’s relation to the reader, visual theory and authorship.

Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase – Jacques Berthoud, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. A demonstration of the clarity, consistency, and depth of thought evident in Conrad’s novels written during the first decade of the twentieth century.

Joseph Conrad: Poland’s English Genius – Muriel Bradbrook, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941. A brief study of the life and work with stories considered in three main themes: the wonders of the deep, the hollow men, and recollections in tranquillity.

Joseph Conrad (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views) – Harold Bloom (ed), New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010. A new selection of contemporary critical commentary, plus a bibliography and a chronology of Conrad’s life.

An Autobiography of Joseph Conrad – Stephen Brennan, Skyhorse Publishing, 2014. Scenes from Conrad’s memoirs and non-fictional writing stitched together to showcase some of the more exciting and trying times in the novelist’s life.

Joseph Conrad and Psychological Medicine – Martin Bock and Robert Hampson, Texas Tech Press, 2002. Revises our understanding of Conrad’s life, and rethinks the dominant themes of his work in light of pre-Freudian medical psychology.

Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession – Hillel M. Daleski, Holmes & Meier, 1977.

Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture – Stephen Donovan, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. An analysis of Conrad’s relation to Victorian and early twentieth century popular culture. Illustrated summaries of the development of specific popular cultural forms—songs, early cinema, magazines, advertising, and tourism—underpin fresh readings of Conrad’s central works.

Joseph Conrad: The Imagined Style – Wilfred S. Dowden, Vanderbilt University Press, 1970. Analyzes the evolution of Conrad’s style and vision of imagery through a study of his novels and short stories.

Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper – Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. A study that relates Conrad’s work to the crisis of modernity in the late nineteenth century, and discusses ‘faultlines’ – ambiguities and apparent aesthetic ruptures – in nine of the major novels and novellas.

Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue – Aaron Fogel, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985. Fogel shows how Conrad shaped ideas and events and interpreted character and institutions by means of dialogues representing not free exchange but various forms of forcing another to respond.

Joseph Conrad: Comparative Essays – Adam Gillon and Raymond Brebach, Texas Tech Press, 1993. Gillon examines the affinities between Conrad’s descriptive art and both painting and film.

Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist – John Dozier Gordon, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1940.

Conrad, Language, and Narrative – Michael Greaney, Cambridge University Press, 2001. Challenges old assumptions and engages current controversies in revelatory and rich close readings.

Conrad the Novelist – Albert J. Guerard, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958.

Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity – Robert Hampson, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992. Traces the development of Conrad’s conception of identity through the three phases of his career: the self in isolation, the self in society, and the sexualised self.

The Theatre of Joseph Conrad: Reconstructed Fictions – Richard J. Hand, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

One of Us: Mastery of Joseph Conrad – Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Chicago University Press, 1997. Conrad has traditionally been viewed as an admirable master: master mariner, storyteller, and writer. But his reputation has been linked in recent years to the negative masteries of racism, imperialism, and patriarchy.

Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness – Jeremy Hawthorn, London: Edward Arnold, 1979. This book explores the interplay between technical accomplishment and artistic conception in Conrad’s work, addressing the question why some of Conrad’s novels are acknowledged masterpieces and others ‘incomplete successes’.

Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment – Jeremy Hawthorn, London: Hodder Arnold, 1992. This study argues that technical skills can be refined but these have to be complemented by a larger vision and commitment – “a conception of the whole” – otherwise it does not result in great art.

Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad – Jeremy Hawthorn, London: Continuum, 2007. This book will open Conrad’s fiction to readings enriched by the insights of critics and theorists associated with Gender Studies and Post-colonialism.

Essays on Conrad – Frank Kermode (ed), Cambridge University Press, 2000. A series of critical studies written by Ian Watt, and edited by Frank Kermode.

The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Owen Knowles, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Background study materials to all the major works – chronologies, critical essays, maps, bibliographies, and the development of Conrad’s critical reputation.

Conrad’s Narrative Method – Jakob Lothe, Ohio State University Press, 2008. This structuralist study of narrative is the first book-length attempt to apply recent developments in critical theory and practice to the whole canon of Conrad’s works.

Joseph Conrad – Tim Middleton, London: Routledge, 2006. A student’s introductory guide to Conrad, his life and work, with a chronology and suggestions for further reading

The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad – Gustav Morf, New York: Astra Books, 1976.

Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties – Ross Murfin, Tuscaloosa, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1985.

Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Jeffery Myers, Cooper Square Press, 2001. This claims to be the definitive biography – but some readers disagree.

Joseph Conrad: A Life – Zdzislaw Najder, Camden House, 2007. This too is tipped as the definitive biography, because Najder’s command of English, French, Polish, and Russian allowed him access to a greater variety of sources than any other biographer, and his Polish background and his own experience as an exile have afforded him a unique affinity for Conrad and his milieu.

The French Face of Joseph Conrad – Lindsay Newman and Yves Hervouet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. This study presents the French face of Conrad’s work, and demonstrates that his knowledge of the French language and its literature (which preceded his acquisition of the English language) has profound implications for the study of the novels.

Joseph Conrad Today – Kieron O’Hara, Imprint Academic, 2007. Argues that Conrad’s scepticism, pessimism, emphasis on the importance and fragility of community, and the difficulties of escaping our history are important tools for understanding the political world in which we live.

Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision – George A. Panichas, Mercer University Press, 2005. The book shows 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.

The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad – John G. Peters, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. This introduction is aimed at students coming to Conrad’s work for the first time. It covers Conrad’s themes of travel, exploration, and racial and ethnic conflict.

A Historical Guide to Joseph Conrad – John G. Peters, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Original essays showcase the abundance of historical material Conrad drew upon, and how he mined his early life as a sailor to create scathing indictments of colonialism and capitalist cupidity.

– Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre – James Phelan, Ohio State University Press, 2008.

Homosexuality in the Life and Work of Joseph Conrad: Love Between the Lines – Richard J. Ruppel, London: Routledge, 2009. Conrad’s recurrent bouts of neurasthenia, his difficult courtships, late marriage, and frequent expressions of misogyny can all be attributed to the fact that Conrad was emotionally, temperamentally, and, perhaps, even erotically more comfortable with men than women.

Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography – Edward Said, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966. Said argues that Conrad, who set his fiction in exotic locations like East Asia and Africa, projects political dimensions in his work that mirror a colonialist preoccupation with ‘civilizing’ native peoples.

Joseph Conrad: The Critical Heritage – Norman Sherry, London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1973. A collection of reviews and essays tracing the development of Conrad’s critical reputation as a novelist.

Joseph Conrad: (Critical Issues) – Allan H. Simmons, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. First-time readers of Conrad are provided with in-depth contexts for appreciating a writer whose work is often challenging, while readers already familiar with Conrad’s fiction will find new perspectives with which to view it.

Joseph Conrad In Context – Allan H. Simmons, Cambridge University Press, 2014. This book examines the biographical, historical, cultural and political contexts that fashioned Conrad’s works. Each short chapter covers a specific theme in relation to Conrad’s life and his fiction.

The New Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – J.H. Stape, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Thirteen chapters offer diverse perspectives on emergent areas of interest, including canon formation, postcolonialism, gender, critical reception and adaptation.

The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad – John Stape, Arrow Books, 2008. A biography that puts its emphasis on Conrad’s life, rather than his work.

Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner – Peter Villiers, Seafarer Books, 2006. A biographical study which traces Conrad’s career as a sailor, and looks at the places he visited in relation to their depiction in his stories and novels.

Conrad in the Nineteenth Century – Ian Watt, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980. Close readings of the novels, full of quotes, detailed analysis and an acute explanation of the major themes of Conrad’s narratives.

Joseph Conrad: (Writers and their Work) – Cedric Watts, London: Northcote House, 1994. Explores Conrad’s importance and influence as a moral, social, and political commentator

Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition – Andrea White, Cambridge University Press, 2008. A study showing how Conrad demythologized and disrupted the imperial subject constructed in earlier writing, and arguing that the very complexity of Conrad’s work provided an alternative, and more critical, means of evaluating the experience of empire.

Joseph Conrad criticism

© Roy Johnson 2015


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Filed Under: Joseph Conrad Tagged With: English literature, Joseph Conrad, Literary criticism, Literary studies, Modernism

Joseph Conrad greatest works

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

introductions, with links to tutorials and study guides

Joseph Conrad took hold of the late nineteenth century ‘action novel’ – the Imperialist Boy’s Own adventure story – and invested it with moral subtlety, aesthetic density, and a powerful sense of ideological seriousness. His writing can be demanding: be prepared for long sentences, complex syntax, abstract vocabulary, philosophic speculations, and an all-male environment. The rewards are profound insights into the human condition, superbly orchestrated moments of drama, and writing which explores issues of deep moral complexity.

He also pushed the complexities of story-telling further than they had ever been before. Keep in mind that Conrad, considered a master of English prose style, was Polish. He was writing in his second language. In this sense he is not unlike the Russian novelist, Vladimir Nabokov.

 

Joseph Conrad greatest works Almayer's FollyAlmayer’s Folly (1895) was Conrad’s first published novel. It is set towards the end of the nineteenth century in the Malay archipelago and deals with the conflicts between European colonialism and the native population. Dreams of easy wealth drive the Dutch trader Kaspar Almayer into grandiose schemes which come to nothing. His mixed-race wife despises him and is having an affair with a local native war lord. He completely misjudges the turmoil of events in which he becomes enmeshed and eventually descends into opium addiction and self-destruction. The novel contains many stereotypes of nineteenth century imperialist ideology, but its events are related in a manner which would lead to the development of literary modernism in the twentieth.
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Joseph Conrad greatest works An Outcast of the IslandsAn Outcast of the Islands (1896) was Conrad’s second novel, and acts as a ‘prequel’ to the first, Almayer’s Folly. English sea captain Tom Lingard rescues the corrupt Peter Willems and gives him a second chance by setting him up with a business in a commercial outpost. However, Willems lacks the moral fibre to profit from this act of generosity. He becomes obsessed with a beautiful native girl, deserts his wife and is overwhelmed by local political factions. All this takes place in southern Indonesia against a background of British and Dutch imperialist squabbling for supremacy in the region. Willems is eventually abandoned by his protector, feels desolate and isolated, then has to face the wrath of his wife who comes in search of him.
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Joseph Conrad greatest works Lord JimLord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

 

Joseph Conrad greatest works Heart of DarknessHeart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

Oxford World Classics offers the best editions of Conrad’s work. They are largely based on the most accurate versions of the texts; and they feature introductory essays, a biography, explanatory notes, textual variants, a bibliography of further reading, and in some cases missing or deleted chapters. They are also terrifically good value.

Joseph Conrad greatest works NostromoNostromo (1904) is Conrad’s ‘big’ political novel – into which he packs all of his major subjects and themes. It is set in the imaginary Latin-American country of Costaguana – and features a stolen hoard of silver, desperate acts of courage, characters trembling on the brink of moral panic. The political background encompasses nationalist revolution and the Imperialism of foreign intervention. Silver is the pivot of the whole story – revealing the courage of some and the corruption and destruction of others. Conrad’s narration is as usual complex and oblique. He begins half way through the events of the revolution, and proceeds by way of flashbacks and glimpses into the future.
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Joseph Conrad greatest works The Secret AgentThe Secret Agent (1907) is a short novel and a masterpiece of sustained irony. It is based on the real incident of a bomb attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1888 and features a cast of wonderfully grotesque characters: Verloc the lazy double agent, Inspector Heat of Scotland Yard, and the Professor – an anarchist who wanders through the novel with bombs strapped round his waist and the detonator in his hand. The English government and police are subject to sustained criticism, and the novel bristles with some wonderfully orchestrated effects of dramatic irony – all set in the murky atmosphere of Victorian London. Here Conrad prefigures all the ambiguities which surround two-faced international relations, duplicitous State realpolitik, and terrorist outrage which still beset us more than a hundred years later.
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Joseph Conrad greatest works Under Western EyesUnder Western Eyes (1911) is the story of Razumov, a reluctant ‘revolutionary’. He is in fact a coward who is mistaken for a radical hero and cannot escape from the existential trap into which this puts him. This is Conrad’s searing critique of Russian ‘revolutionaries’ who put his own Polish family into exile and jeopardy. The ‘Western Eyes’ are those of an Englishman who reads and comments on Razumov’s journal – thereby creating another chance for Conrad to recount the events from a very complex perspective. Razumov achieves partial redemption as a result of his relationship with a good woman, but the ending, with faint echoes of Dostoyevski, is tragic for all concerned.
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Joseph Conrad greatest works ChanceChance is the first of Conrad’s novels to achieve a wide commercial success, and one of the few to have a happy ending. It tells the story of Flora de Barral, the abandoned daughter of a bankrupt tycoon, and her long struggle to find happiness and dignity. He takes his techniques of weaving complex narratives to a challenging level here. His narrator Marlow is piecing together the story from a mixture of personal experience and conversations with other characters in the novel. At times it is difficult to remember who is saying what to whom. This is a work for advanced Conrad fans only. Make sure you have read some of the earlier works first, before tackling this one.
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Joseph Conrad greatest works VictoryVictory (1915) is set in the legendary port of Surabaya and in an outpost of the Malayan archipelago. It is the story of Swedish recluse Axel Heyst, who rescues Lena, a young woman from a touring orchestra and runs off to live in remote seclusion, influenced by the pessimistic philosophy of his father. But he is pursued by two lying and scheming English gamblers, who believe he is concealing ill-gotten wealth. They corner him in his retreat, and despite the efforts of Lena to shield Heyst from their plans, there is a tragic confrontation which brings destruction into their island paradise.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
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© Roy Johnson 2004


Joseph Conrad links

Joseph Conrad - tutorials Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Red button Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad - eBooks Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad - further reading Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad - adaptations Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Joseph Conrad - etexts Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

Joseph Conrad - journal The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

Conrad US journal The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Joseph Conrad - concordance Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.


More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
More on Joseph Conrad tales


Filed Under: Joseph Conrad Tagged With: Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, Chance, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, Literary studies, Lord Jim, Modernism, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, Victory

Joseph Conrad prose style

March 18, 2014 by Roy Johnson

how to start analysing prose style

Joseph Conrad was famous for his prose style – yet English was his third language, the first two being Polish and French. He was not unlike the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who began writing in his native Russian, then switched to French, and finally started writing in English when he emigrated to America in 1940. Both of these authors are widely regarded as great prose stylists and masters of the English language.

Nevertheless, it is not unusual for some readers to complain about the difficulties they feel in grappling with Conrad’s style when encountering his writing for the first time. It’s true that his writing is not the clearest and easiest to understand: in fact a liking for his style is something of an acquired taste. But it is possible to come to terms with the difficulties he presents (the long, complex sentences and abstract language) with concentration, thoughtful reflection, and practice.

The tutorial notes that follow are one way of diffusing these problems by analysing some technical aspects of Conrad’s prose style. They are in no way rigorous or systematic: there are other types of close reading and analysis which can throw light on aspects of a writer’s prose style (see the examples listed below).

The extract which follows is from the opening pages of Conrad’s early story An Outpost of Progress, first published in 1897. It deals with two European characters who have recently arrived at a trading station somewhere in central Africa. If you wish to read the complete story in conjunction with these tutorial notes, it is available free at Project Gutenberg.

redbtn An Outpost of Progress


Joseph Conrad prose style

First edition – J.M.Dent & Sons 1912


Sample text

The two men watched the steamer round the bend, then, ascending arm in arm the slope of the bank, returned to the station. They had been in this vast and dark country only a very short time, and as yet always in the midst of other white men, under the eye and guidance of their superiors. And now, dull as they were to the subtle influences of surroundings, they felt themselves very much alone, when suddenly left unassisted to face the wilderness; a wilderness rendered more strange, more incomprehensible by the mysterious glimpses of the vigorous life it contained. They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart. To the sentiment of being alone of one’s kind, to the clear perception of the loneliness of one’s thoughts, of one’s sensations—to the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous; a suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike.


Joseph Conrad prose style – analysis

Sentence length
Some of the sentences here are quite long – particularly the last. This is because he is expressing quite complex ideas or generating a very charged atmosphere. But they are not all long: the first, which deals with an action by characters, is much shorter.

Narrative mode
Conrad adopts the common third person omniscient narrative mode. That is, he tells us what his characters do, how they feel, and what they think. But you might notice that statements such as the one begriming ‘Few men realise’ is of a different kind than, say, ‘The two men watched’. Conrad stops telling the story for a moment and is offering us his opinion. In fact everything else up to the end of the paragraph is Conrad’s own general view of the world. He suddenly becomes what is called an ‘intrusive narrator’ at this point. He intervenes in his own narrative to comment on the story and offer his philosophic reflections on life in general.

It’s easy to overlook this distinction when engaged with the drama of the narrative, but it has an important bearing on our interpretation of the story. That’s because these intrusions into the story help him to project a particular view of the world – which add up to an ideology.

Language
You will probably notice that he uses a number of terms which will cause most people to think ‘Now what exactly does he mean by that?’ These are expressions such as ‘irresistible force’, ‘unmitigated savagery’, ‘negation of the habitual’, and ‘discomposing intrusion’. What make these difficult to grasp at first is that he is switching from the very concrete and specific descriptions of the two men and the trading station to an abstract and very general consideration of their moral condition.

This is almost the language of philosophy. The terms ‘force’, ‘savagery’, ‘habitual’, and ‘intrusion’ are all abstract nouns. We are not necessarily conscious of this whilst reading the text, but they take us away from the ‘story’ and force us to consider rather large scale social reflections.

In fact the combination of rather unusual and powerful adjective qualifying an abstract noun – ‘unmitigated savagery, ‘profound trouble’ – is a ‘trade mark’ of Conrad’s prose style. You will see many other examples in almost all his stories and novels.

Prose rhythm
In prose writing, rhythm is easier to feel than to define. You do not need to go into all the technical detail of stress analysis as you might with poetry, but it should be possible to sense that Conrad puts a lot of rhythmic emphasis into what he writes, using a number of literary devices more commonly found in poetry:

  • alliteration
  • repetition
  • balanced clauses

Alliteration
‘The courage, the composure, the confidence’ is a fairly obvious example of alliteration, with an insistent stress falling on the initial letter c in each of these words. Notice too that they are all abstract nouns.

Repetition
The expression ‘with primitive nature and primitive man’ combines both alliteration (in the initial letter p) with repetition of the word ‘primitive’ itself. You might also note that his use of the second ‘primitive’ here throws the emphasis onto the word that follows it – ‘man’. There are plenty of other examples of the same thing in this paragraph: ‘more strange, more incomprehensible’ and ‘every great and every insignificant’ are just two.

Repetition is just one of the rhetorical devices at work here: and rhetoric is ‘the art of speakers or writers to persuade, inform, or motivate their audience’.

Balanced clauses
The rather long sentences in this passage also contain a different kind of repetition – that is, clauses which are similar to each other in grammatical construction. These are sometimes called ‘balanced clauses’. The final sentence begins with the phrase ‘To the sentiment of being alone’, and in order to ‘tug’ us through the fairly lengthy reflection that follows Conrad repeats the initial ‘to’ and the construction of the clause of which it is a part. So we have, ‘To the sentiment of being … to the clear perception … to the negation of the habitual’.

Finally, look at the construction of the sentence that begins ‘Few men realise that their life’. Conrad wants to explain what he has in mind by using the term ‘life’, so he inserts two clauses which expand the notion. But in doing so, and whilst we are so to speak ‘waiting’ for the end of the sentence, his terms of expansion are nicely balanced: ‘the very essence of their character’ (with its emphasis falling on ‘essence’ and ‘character’, is paralleled by the following clause ‘their capabilities and their audacities’ with the emphasis falling again on two abstract nouns.

The abstraction forces readers into a quasi-philosophical mode of thinking about ‘life’. What exactly does he mean by people’s ‘capabilities’ and ‘audacities’? His answers will come from the events of the narrative itself – which show his two characters to be lazy, stupid, and moral cowards. This appears to ‘prove’ or at least justify his judgements about human beings and society in general – which is part of any writer’s conscious or unconscious objective.


Joseph Conrad prose styleStudying Fiction is an introduction to the basic concepts and the language you will need for studying prose fiction. It explains the elements of literary analysis one at a time, then shows you how to apply them. The guidance is carefully graded, starting from simple issues of language then progressing to more complex issues. The single volume contains stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Katherine Mansfield, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, and Charles Dickens. All of them are excellent tales in their own right. The guidance notes on this page were written by the same author.
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Close reading exercises

redbtn Sample close reading of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House

redbtn Sample close reading of Katherine Mansfield’s The Voyage

redbtn Sample close reading of Virginia Woolf’s Monday or Tuesday


Other novels by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad Lord JimLord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

Joseph Conrad Heart of DarknessHeart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2014


Joseph Conrad links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.


More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
More on Joseph Conrad tales


Filed Under: Joseph Conrad Tagged With: Close reading, English literature, Joseph Conrad, Literary studies, The Short Story

Joseph Conrad web links

December 10, 2010 by Roy Johnson

a selection of web-based archives and resources

This short selection of Joseph Conrad web links offers quick connections to resources for further study. It’s not comprehensive, and if you have any ideas for additional resources, please use the ‘Comments’ box below to make suggestions. The university-based web sites tend to be rather old in terms of graphic design, but have the advantage of depth in terms of content.

Joseph Conrad - portrait

Joseph Conrad links

Joseph Conrad - tutorials Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Red button Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad - eBooks Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad - further reading Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad - adaptations Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Joseph Conrad - etexts Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

Joseph Conrad - journal The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

Conrad US journal The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Joseph Conrad - concordance Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.


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.

Almayer's Folly

© Roy Johnson 2010


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Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

June 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

critical survey and literary essays

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness book looks at the famous novella in detail from the perspective of the early twenty-first century and offers a series of critical essays which plot its reception and the establishment of its reputation. It begins with a long essay by the editor exploring its political, social, and literary background, offering a defence of Conrad. This is a counter to the criticisms made by Edward Said and Chinua Achebe which claim that Conrad, for all his liberalism, cannot conceal a submerged racism and imperialism from his critical gaze.

Joseph Conrad's Heart of DarknessHeart of Darkness was written in 1899, and was based loosely on Conrad’s own experience as a seaman with a commission to sail up the Congo river in 1890. During the twentieth century it has become a central text in the discussion of European imperialism , and possibly the best known of Conrad’s works – even though his first commercial success did not come until much later with the publication of Chance in 1913.

D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke even puts in a spirited defence of Conrad as an even-handed writer in gender terms. I’m afraid he’s on something of a hopeless quest here, as anyone who has read widely in Conrad will know – particularly some of his deservedly less well-known short stories.

There’s a chapter which traces the critical debate on Heart of Darkness from its publication to the present day. This allows readers the opportunity to witness how succeeding generations have interpreted the text, and it’s a refreshing reminder that literary criticism has fads and fashions which change and even disappear.

The latter half of the book is given over to five extended critical readings of the text. These represent what are currently perceived as major schools of literary criticism – neo-Marxist, historicist, feminist, deconstructionist, and narratological. These will allow the serious students of literature at whom the book is aimed to sense the academic climate and see what to aim at in their own work.

The feminist critique takes up the conventional objection that Conrad’s works don’t include many female characters, and even includes a bizarre recipe for those who cannot accept that a writer might not share contemporary values.

Nina Pelikan Straus concluded that while women readers may find some way to appreciate the text (she offers a number of reading strategies), in the end the best that women readers can do is remain detached from Heart of Darkness and refuse to grant the status of high art to the work.

There’s also an interesting bonus – an appendix in which two film adaptations of the text are analysed. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now! (1979) and Nicholas Roeg’s Heart of Darkness (1994) are compared with the original text in a way which casts interesting light on both, though no mention is made of the ‘deleted’ scenes on the old French rubber plantation in Coppola’s film which would reinforce the fact that his work was about imperialism and not just war.

It’s a pity even more divergent views are not represented, but maybe there’s just not enough room in one volume. As Douglas Hewitt, one of the many critics cited in this very scholarly survey observes: “Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has had more critical attention per word than any other modern prose work”.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Abingdon: Routledge, 2007, pp.160, ISBN 0415357764


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Journey Back to the Source

January 19, 2015 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, comment, study resources, plot, and web links

Journey Back to the Source (Viaje al semilla) was written in 1944, but first published in 1963 in Havana, Cuba as part of the collection entitled The War of Time – Guerra del tiempo (1963). This was a group of stories all told in radically different styles, first published in English by Victor Gollancz in 1970 and translated from the original Spanish by the Bloomsbury Group diarist Frances Partridge.

Journey Back to the Source


Journey Back to the Source – critical commentary

The principal conceit of this tale is that it is a narrative in which time goes backwards. The main story starts with the death of Don Marcial and finishes with his birth. With one or two minor exceptions, Carpentier delivers this chronological illusion very successfully. Candles don’t burn, but regain their full size; a piano becomes a clavichord; Don Marcial gets younger and younger, until the very furniture in his house dwarfs him as a child.

In the penultimate section of the story this reversal of time accelerates very rapidly. Don Marcial as an infant re-enters his mother’s body; furniture reverts to trees in the forest; and then all animal and plant life returns to its origins.

But in fact the composition of the story is a little more complex than this conceit would suggest. The life-history-in-reverse is bookended by two brief sections in conventional chronological sequence, describing first the demolition of Don Marcial’s house after his death, and later the flat plot of land on which it once stood. The story is an amusing meditation on time and causality – but it is situated within a rational framework of normal temporality.

It is worth noting (particularly because it is so little acknowledged) that it was Carpentier who coined the term ‘magical realism’ (lo real maravilloso) in which the concrete, real world becomes suffused with fantasy elements, myths, dreams, and a fractured sense of time and logic. This story is a good example of the literary genre. For a more extended example of its kind, see his 1940 novel, The Kingdom of this World (El reino de este mundo).


Journey Back to the Source – study resources

Journey Back to the Source is one of five stories contained in the collection The War of Time. The other four stories are Right of Sanctuary (1967), The Road to Santiago (1948), Like the Night (1947), and The Wise Men (1967).

Journey Back to the Source Journey Back to the Source – at Amazon UK – (text in English)

Journey Back to the Source Viaje al semilla – at Amazon UK – (Text in Spanish)

Journey Back to the Source Journey Back to the Source – at Amazon US – (Text in English)

Journey Back to the Source Viaje al semilla – at Amazon US – (Text in Spanish)


Journey Back to the Source – plot summary

Part 1.   An old Negro sits in a garden where he watches an ancient house in the process of being demolished.

Part 2.   In a reversal of time, the house is re-assembled, and the man enters the house where Don Marcial, its owner, is lying on his death bed.

Part 3.   Don Marcial gradually recovers and retracts the dying confession he has made to his priest. His mistress gets out of bed, gets dressed, and leaves the house. He stands before the mirror and doesn’t feel well. He is oppressed by the legal documentation involved in the sale of his house.

Part 4.   He has taken a mistress following a period of mourning after the death of his wife. Relatives and friends gather to mark her passing. The house and its contents grow younger.

Part 5.   Don Marcial and the Marquesa get to know each other in the early days of their marriage. They move back into the city from their country estate and get married. Friends take their presents back home and Don Marcial lives in his house alone as a bachelor.

Part 6.   He feels under the weather after celebrating his minority with friends. They get dressed up in old clothes from the attic and hold a musical party where he flirts with a young girl. Earlier, along with his male friends, he has visited a dance hall.

Part 7.   Don Marcial only does moderately well in his college examinations, and then learns less and less at school. When he leaves the seminary he enters a period of spiritual doubt and emotional crisis.

Part 8.   The furniture in his house grows taller. He begins to play with toy soldiers, and takes to sitting on the floor and hiding under the clavichord.

Part 9.   He is given extra pastries one day, then sees servants carrying a coffin into the house. He visits his father who is ill in bed. He then recalls his father’s former talents and sexual misdeeds with a servant.

Part 10.   The infant Don Marciale has a close relationship with the household servant Melchor, with whom he shares secrets.

Part 11.   When Melchor is not there, his closest friends are the household dogs, with whom he shares his life. He begins using baby-talk.

Part 12.   He forgets his own name, and before his christening exists in a world of touch alone. Then the natural world around him turns back to its roots and origins, leaving a blank where his house once stood.

Part 13.   The next day the demolition crew return to find the house has gone, and time progressing in its normal manner.

The Road to Santiago

Alejo Carpentier

Alejo Carpentier web links

Carpentier at Wikipedia
Background, biography, magical realism, major works, literary style, further reading

Carpentier at Amazon UK
Novels, criticism, and interviews – in Spanish and English

The Kingdom of this World
Lecture by Rod Marsh – University of Cambridge

Carpentier at Internet Movie Database
Films and TV movies made from his novels

Carpentier in Depth
Spanish video documentary and interview with Carpentier (1977)

© Roy Johnson 2015


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Kafka: An Introduction

July 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

brief guide to a great twentieth-century writer

Kafka was a writer of such stunning originality that usually no more than a single sentence is required to identify his work. He conjured up arresting images and unforgettable scenes, and wrote stories unlike any that had gone before.

Those, and I am one of them, who find even a small ordinary sized mole disgusting, would probably have died of disgust if they had seen the great mole that a few years back was observed in the neighbourhood of one of our villages, which achieved a certain transitory celebrity on account of the incident.

Kafka: A Very Short IntroductionThis introductory guide to the writer and his work comes from a new series by Oxford University Press. They are written by specialists, aimed at the common reader, and offer an introduction to the main cultural and philosophical ideas which have shaped the western world. Ritchie Robertson takes a fairly even-handed approach to Kafka: appreciative, not uncritical, and certainly avoiding the hagiographic excesses of many commentators who would elevate him to saint-like status.

Instead, he takes a quick look at Kafka’s tortured life, and reasonably argues that much of his writing is a metaphorical or a symbolic rendering of it. There are some suggestions on how we might read Kafka, but his choice is to look at three or four key texts in detail, whilst bringing in support for his arguments from Kafka’s many fragments of writing, his aphorisms, and his voluminous correspondence.

Kafka anticipated much of the radical alienation, the existential Angst and sense of terror which became obvious in European political life after his death. This comes through clearly, but Robertson also takes interestingly novel approaches which look at aspects of Kafka’s work which are often ignored.

One of these is a particularly incisive chapter on The Body in Kafka’s writing. He argues persuasively that physical attributes, denial of the body through fasting, and even gestures feature as symbolic forces in his work.

Another fruitful theme he explores is Kafka’s fascination with institutions and figures of power, towards which he had an often ambiguous relation. These include the family, the legal system (in which he worked) the bureaucratic organisation, the court, the church, the castle, the judge, and the father – to whom he wrote the famous letter which was not sent.

The writing is clear, polished, and non-patronising. Like most good critical commentary, it makes you feel like going back to the original texts to read them again.

Finally he turns to a religious reading – the traditional manner in which this most enigmatic of writers has been interpreted. He deals with Kafka’s ambiguous position within a Jeudeo-Christian tradition, then passes on to his spiritual sense of self which became particularly marked in his later work.

This is a very interesting and attractive format – a small, pocket-sized book, stylishly designed, with illustrations, endnotes, suggestions for further reading, and an index.

© Roy Johnson 2004

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Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp.136, ISBN 0192804553


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Katherine Mansfield – life and works

September 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Katherine Mansfield - portrait1888. Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp was born into a socially prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand. Her father was a banker, who went on to become chairman of the Bank of New Zealand. She was first cousin of Elizabeth Beauchamp, who married into German aristocracy to become Countess Elizabeth von Arnim. She had a somewhat insecure childhood. Her mother left her when she was only one year old to go on a trip to England. She was raised largely by her grandmother, who features in some of the stories as ‘Mrs Fairfield’.

1895. She attended Karori State School with her sisters, and proved to be gifted at writing, even though her spelling was poor.

1898. Attended Wellington Girls’ High School. Some of her earliest sketches appeared in the school magazine, and she won a composition prize for ‘A Sea Voyage’.

1901. She attended a private finishing school, showed a somewhat precocious interest in notions of ‘free love’, and continued writing stories. It is obvious even at this early stage that she was interested in creating a good prose style. The following was written when she was fifteen:

This evening I have sat in my chair with my reading lamp turned low, and given myself up to thoughts of the years that have passed. Like a strain of minor music they have surged across my heart, and the memory of them, sweet and fragrant as the perfume of my flowers, has sent a strange thrill of comfort through my tired brain.

1902. She becomes very passionate about writing and music, and is greatly influenced by Chekhov and Oscar Wilde, whose notoriety at that time was still at its height. She falls in love with Arnold Trowell, the son of her cello teacher.

1903. The family travel to London, and KM attends Queen’s College in Harley Street which had been founded by Charles Kingsley to prepare young women for higher education. On her first day there she meets Ida Baker, who was to become a central figure in the rest of her life. Five of her sketches appear in Queen’s College Magazine.

1906. She gives herself up to a rather bohemian lifestyle, and has affairs with both men and women. Because of this, her parents take her back home to New Zealand against her wishes.

1907. Three sketches and a poem published in the Melbourne Native Companion.

1907. Love affairs with two girls. Her family send her on a tour of New Zealand’s northern island. Love affair with a Maori girl.

1908. Her family give up in the fight against her rebellious nature, and she is allowed to go back to London with an allowance of £100 per year from her father. She lodges in Little Venice, and is in love with Garnet Trowell (Arnold’s twin brother).

1909. Pregnant by Garnet Trowell, she marries singing teacher George Bowden and leaves him the same evening (without consummating the marriage) to join a travelling light opera company in Glasgow. Her mother travels from New Zealand to restore order, and takes KM to Bavaria for what she describes as a ‘cold water cure’. She has a miscarriage.

1910. Returns to London, where she is hospitalised for gonorrhoea. She then goes back to live with her husband. Some of her stories are published in the New Age, alongside writers such as H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and Hilare Belloc. At this stage she begins to suffer from severe bouts of illness.

1911. She has an abortion, then travels to Bruges and Geneva. In a German Pension published in the autumn.

1912. Meets John Middleton Murry and becomes with him the editor of a magazine which causes something of a scandal by its title alone – Rhythm. They live together, moving from England to France and back again, sometimes living together with her most devoted ex-lover, Ida Baker, who KM sometimes calls her ‘wife’.

1913. Friendships and fallings-out with both Henri and Sophia Gaudier-Brzeska, and Frieda and D.H.Lawrence. Last issue of Rhythm. Four stories published in the Blue Review, which then failed. Works as a film extra.

1914. Murry declared bankrupt: he leaves London to live in the country. KM ill: she writes love letters to fellow Rhythm contributor Francis Carco in France.

1915. Her brother Leslie Beauchamp visits her in London on his way to join regiment. KM leaves Murry and travels to Paris to live with Francis Carco. She is then reconciled with Murry, then goes back to Carco in France. Begins to write The Aloe (which becomes Prelude). Three stories published in Signature, which then folds. Brother killed in war. Moves to live in Bandol, France.

1916. Moves to Zennor, Cornwall with the Lawrences, who have violent rows and fights. Finally ‘leaves’ Murry. Visits Ottoline Morell’s home at Garsington, Oxfordshire.

1917. Moves to live in Chelsea, and begins to write ‘narratorless’ stories. Meetings with Virginia Woolf. Both of them realise that they are making similar experiments in prose fiction, and feel a combination of rivalry and friendship.

1918. Moves back to live in Bandol. Tuberculosis diagnosed. Returns to London and divorces George Bowden. Marries John Middleton Murry (wearing Frieda Lawrence’s wedding ring). They live together in a house in Hampstead – together with Ida Baker. Prelude published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press.

1919. Regular contact with Virginia Woolf. Writes reviews for the Athenaeum (edited by Murry). Moves to San Remo Italy with Ida Baker. Murry visits occasionally.

1920. Moves to live in Menton, France. Murry begins to dally with other women. KM returns to London. Bliss and Other Stories published by Constable. Returns to France.

1921. Returns to London to scare off Princess Bibesco, who has been dallying with Murry. Moves to live in Switzerland, where her neighbour Rainer Maria Rilke is writing the Duino Elegies. Intense creative bursts between bouts of severe illness.

1922. Moves to Paris for radium treatment for her TB. Moves back to Switzerland. Murry leaves KM, who prepares her will, making Murry her literary executor. Returns to France to join in the mystic ‘treatment’ which was then fashionable at the Gurdjieff Institute at Fontainbebleau, France.

1923. Murry arrives in Fontainebleau on the day that KM dies – 9 January 1923, aged just thirty-five.


Katherine Mansfield


Katherine Mansfield – web links

Katherine Mansfield - web links Katherine Mansfield at Mantex
Life and works, biography, a close reading, and critical essays

Katherine Mansfield - web links Katherine Mansfield at Wikipedia
Biography, legacy, works, biographies, films and adaptations

Katherine Mansfield - web links Katherine Mansfield at Online Books
Collections of her short stories available at a variety of online sources

Katherine Mansfield - web links Not Under Forty
A charming collection of literary essays by Willa Cather, which includes a discussion of Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield - web links Katherine Mansfield at Gutenberg
Free downloadable versions of her stories in a variety of digital formats

Katherine Mansfield - web links Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, including Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’

Katherine Mansfield - web links Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Aesthetic
An academic essay by Annie Pfeifer at Yale University’s Modernism Lab

Katherine Mansfield - web links The Katherine Mansfield Society
Newsletter, events, essay prize, resources, yearbook

Katherine Mansfield - web links Katherine Mansfield Birthplace
Biography, birthplace, links to essays, exhibitions

Katherine Mansfield - web links Katherine Mansfield Website
New biography, relationships, photographs, uncollected stories

© Roy Johnson 2014


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Katherine Mansfield biography

July 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

biography of a literary bohemian

Katherine Mansfield has the rare distinction of being regarded as a major writer, even though she only ever published short stories. In fact her entire oeuvre is available in just one volume. There are two other biographies by Jeffrey Myers and Anthony Alpers, but Claire Tomalin’s is a fairly straightforward and very readable account of her life. She portrays her talent sympathetically, but does not disguise her weaknesses and her occasional unkindnesses, though she does seem either squeamish or even purblind where sexual matters are concerned. However, she is very well informed and spares us none of the medical details of gonnorhoea and tuberculosis which helped to bring KM’s life to a premature end.

Katherine Mansfield biographyMansfield’s talent blossomed as soon as she was sent from her privileged but stiflingly conformist upbringing in New Zealand to be educated at Queen’s College in Harley Street. These important years – from fourteen to seventeen – confirmed her taste for artistic matters, and it was on return from there to New Zealand that she had her first success as a writer.

But in 1908 she was back in London, ready to throw herself into full scale Bohemianism. She quickly became pregnant, then tricked another man into marrying her without telling him about her condition, and left him the same night. Within the next few months she suffered a miscarriage and acquired a new Polish lover, from whom she contracted gonnorhoea.

She recovered in the company of her life-long partner Ida Baker, whom she regarded as her ‘wife’, then since she was short of money she tricked her way back into free lodging with her lawful husband and began publishing with A. R. Orage’s New Age, which was later to become the New Statesman.

More literary success followed. She published her first collection of sketches In a German Pension, then was introduced to John Middleton Murry, who became her lover then her second husband.

In structure, the book is almost one chapter per year from 1907 onwards of Mansfield’s tragically short life. Tomalin does not disguise the fact that she thinks much of the earlier work is self-indulgent, sentimental, and quite weak – which it is. But there would be greatness to come.

Lots more of La vie Boheme follows: constantly on the move; short of money; living promiscuously in every sense; and writing for small literary magazines which either don’t pay or go out of business.

She leaves Murry and travels to northern France in the middle of the First World War for an assignation with fellow artist Francis Carco, then goes back to Murray, and by 1916 is in deep with The Bloomsbury Group, even moving into a house in Gower Street with painters Dorothy Brett and Dora Carrington.

When the first signs of the tuberculosis which was to kill her appeared, she went to live in Bandol with her ‘wife’ Ida, then when her health temporarily improved, she returned home to London and married Murray, with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda as witnesses.

She had a spasmodic but very close relationship as fellow authors with Virginia Woolf. Both of them were working on the development of the short story and the possibilities of a more elliptic prose style at the same time. Both regarded each other’s work highly, even though they knew that they were ‘rivals’.

Tomalin gives a very clear-headed critique of the patchiness of KM’s writing, as well as a persuasive account of the biographical basis for much of its content – but she does not say much about what made her writing and the development of the post-Checkhov short story so original.

KM’s last years were a restless search for a cure for her illnesses, combined with an outpouring of her greatest works. She zigzags back and forth across northern Europe, finally dying outside Paris in 1923. She was just thirty-five years old.

© Roy Johnson 2004

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Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, London: Penguin, new edition 2003, pp.304, ISBN 0140117156


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Katherine Mansfield critical essays

August 14, 2011 by Roy Johnson

modernism, psychoanalysis, and autobiography

Katherine Mansfield – Critical Essays is a collection of conference papers given to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Katherine Mansfield’s arrival in London from New Zealand in 1908, and the start of her career as a writer. They are arranged in groups dealing with biographical readings, modernism, psychoanalytic interpretations, and autobiography. Biographist Vincent O’Sullivan attempts to explain why Mansfield was so impressed by the mystics Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, and so influenced by Lewis Wallace’s Cosmic Anatomy – but his comments tell us more about the details of her last years than they do about the nature or the quality of her writing. Another essay does something similar by tracing her relationship with John Middleton Murry and the use they made of fragments of biography in the fictions they both produced.

Katherine Mansfield Critical EssaysSome essays go into endless detail blurring the boundaries between biography and fiction, ignoring the distinctions which should be made between the two. On the whole, they end up by saying very little of value about either. Considering that most of the authors are senior academics, it’s amazing that so little effort is made to be rigorous about these matters – though I suppose it proves the powerful attraction that biographical ‘evidence’ still exerts on critics, even though they might profess themselves post-modern.

Sarah Sandley is on much firmer grounds looking at Mansfield’s fondness for the cinema, and even tracing the films she was likely to have seen. She then offers fairly clear evidence from the texts to argue that she used filmic techniques in her approach to narrative.

As an aside, it is interesting to note how many of these essays revert to consideration of the same story – ‘Je ne parle pas francais’ – which anybody embarking on this volume would do well to re-read before looking at the separate studies.

There’s a brave contribution that tries to establish links between Mansfield’s writing and her interest in music. She was an accomplished cellist, and it’s true that her compositions often have a conscious structure which can be likened to a musical form. But the convincing evidence is never produced. Mansfield writes about music and has characters who are musicians – but that’s all. It’s only possible to say that one artistic form may be likened to another. Any more than that is rather like Goethe saying ‘Architecture is frozen music’: it’s a striking phrase, but it doesn’t yield analytic insights or go anywhere.

A section of psychoanalytic readings is the signal for an intensification of theoretical jargon and fashionable name-dropping – but most of the contributions remain unconvincing.

Fortunately, the last group of essays dealing with the relationship between autobiography and fiction are on much stronger ground. Mansfield left a substantial account of her life and feelings behind in her journals, letters, and notebooks, never concealing the fact that many of her stories were based on episodes from her own life.

Janet Wilson has an interesting piece which looks at Mansfield’s conflicted feelings over her status as a colonial settler and the sympathies for natives she felt – particularly in her erotic relationship with her friend, the half-Maori girl Martha Grace Mahupuku.

Angela Smith makes an insightful and largely persuasive case for Mansfield’s appreciation of Charles Dickens – a taste she held at a time when Dickens was considered passé in most literary circles.

There’s an article by Anna Jackson on the ‘poetics’ of the notebooks and letters, and the collection ends with an essay by the Mansfield scholar and novelist C.K. Stead recounting the difficulty of establishing properly edited texts of her work.

These later pieces seem to rescue the collection from the blight of literary criticism in its current manifestation as a mechanism for generating career-enhancing fodder for the next round of the Research Assessment Exercise.

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© Roy Johnson 2011


Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson (eds), Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp.241, ISBN: 023027773X


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