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literary studies, cultural history, and study skill techniques

John Maynard Keynes biography

September 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

economist and government political adviser

John Maynard Keynes (pronounced “Kaynz”) was one the most important figures in the history of economics. He revolutionized the subject with his classic study, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). This is generally regarded as one of the most influential social science treatises of the twentieth century. It quickly and permanently changed the way the world looked at the economy and the role of government in society. He was born in 1883 in Cambridge into an academic family. His father, John Nevile Keynes, was a lecturer at the University of Cambridge teaching logic and political economy. His mother Florence Ada Brown was a remarkable woman who was a highly successful author and a pioneer in social reform. She was also the first woman mayor of Cambridge. An interesting family detail is that although Keynes lived to the age of sixty-three, both his parents outlived him.

He was educated at Eton and King’s College Cambridge where his intelligence made him very successful. He was almost immediately elected into the secret society known as the Cambridge Apostles. There he met Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf, who became his lifelong friends. It was through these connections that he became part of the Bloomsbury Group.

In 1908 he began a serious affair with the painter Duncan Grant. Keynes had numerous affairs with other young men, but never he never had the slightest legal or social trouble, even though homosexuality was illegal at that time. This charmed life can be explained by his combination of personal brilliance, family and professional connections, and remarkable self-confidence. Keynes lectured in economics at Cambridge on and off from 1908. He also worked at the India Office and in 1913 as a member of the Royal Commission on Indian finance and currency, published his first book on the subject.

He represented the Treasury at the Versailles Peace Conference, but resigned in strong opposition to the terms of the draft treaty which he set out in his next book Economic Consequences of the Peace, (1919). Keynes argued that the war reparations imposed on Germany could not be paid by a country which had been devastated by war. He warned that this would lead to further conflict in Europe – which of course turned out to be true.

In 1925 Keynes married a Diaghilev ballerina, Lydia Lopokova, but they never had children. With his wife he helped to found the Vic-Wells ballet. He also financed the establishment of the Arts Theatre, Cambridge. Although he never earned a great deal from either his academic or government appointments, he made himself quite rich by stock market investments. He was reputed to spend the first part of every day in bed, telephoning instructions to his stock-broker. Of course he had the advantage of knowing what the government’s economic policies were going to be (since he helped to establish them) – so this sort of activity is what we would today call ‘insider trading’.

In 1936 Keynes published his most important book A General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. It revolutionized economic theory by showing how unemployment could occur involuntarily. Keynes argued that the lack of demand for goods and rising unemployment could be countered by increased government expenditure to stimulate the economy.

By 1937 Keynes’ health began to deteriorate. He would never be fully fit again. However, his expertise was such that he was given an honorary role in the Treasury during World War Two. One of the most important projects he was involved in during his last years was the setting up of the International Monetary Fund.

In 1942 Keynes was elevated to the peerage and took his seat in the House of Lords, where he sat on the Liberal benches. Around the same time he became chairman of the newly formed Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts which, before the end of the war, was renamed the British Arts Council. He died in 1946.

Bloomsbury Group – web links

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

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Twentieth century literature

John Middleton Murry

January 31, 2018 by Roy Johnson

poet, critic, pacifist, publisher

John Middleton Murry (1889)-1957) was an influential and prolific writer in the English modernist period. He is probably best known for his problematic marriage to fellow writer Katherine Mansfield and his association with D.H. Lawrence. He produced over sixty books plus countless essays on literature, social issues, and religious topics.

Murry (without the ‘a’) was born in Peckham, the son of a clerk in the Inland Revenue. He was educated at Christ’s Hospital (‘Bluecoat School’) before winning an exhibition scholarship and going on to Brasenose College Oxford to study classics. He finished with a first class degree in 1910.

Whilst still an undergraduate he founded the magazine Rhythm, which was thought at the time to be a daringly suggestive title. Interestingly it was later re-named in 1914 as The Blue Review.

Around the same time Murry met the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield, who he made an associate editor of his magazine, which published some of her short stories. They embarked on a stormy relationship that included infidelities by both parties.

Murry was judged unfit for military service during the First World War, but he did work for the political intelligence service in the War Office as editor of the confidential Daily Review of the Foreign Press. He spent some time with pacifists and conscientious objectors who assembled at the home of Philip and Ottoline Morrell at Garsington Manor in Oxford.

There he became close friends with D.H. Lawrence and Frieda Von Richthofen. The relationships between the two couples were used as fictional material for Lawrence’s novel, Women in Love. Murry and Mansfield went to live as their neighbours, first in Buckinghamshire, then at Zennor in Cornwall. There was an attempt at communal living which collapsed fairly quickly.

In 1915 Murry and Lawrence established a new magazine called The Signature. Like many other small minority-interest publications it folded quickly – after only three issues. In 1918 Murry married Katherine Mansfield and they settled near Hampstead Heath, together with Ida Baker, one of Mansfield’s former lovers.

Murry was appointed in 1919 as editor of the literary magazine Athenaeum. It featured writing by Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot. Two years later it became The Nation and Athenaeum. Murry moved on to become founding editor of The Adelphi. This magazine featured a rather curious mixture of literature, quasi-Marxist politics, and a return-to-the-land ethos.

Katherine Mansfield

When Katherine Mansfield moved to live in France with Ida Baker, Murry began a dalliance with Princess Bibesco – the daughter of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. Mansfield hurried back to London in order to squash the liaison.

In 1922 Murry published what was to be his most popular and influential work, The Problem of Style. He also began an affair with Mansfield’s house-mate Dorothy Brett which resulted in a pregnancy and a miscarriage.

Following Mansfield’s death in 1924, Murry edited her stories, her journals, and her diaries. This was done with the intention of promoting her literary reputation, the success of which generated a considerable income for Murry in royalties. But in the time that has passed since these publications he has been criticised for watering down her more radical views.

Following the death of Lawrence in 1930, Murry began a brief affair with his widow Frieda. He married for the third time in 1931 and also began a brief phase as a Marxist. He then moved from a socialist to a radical Christian, pacifist, and communalist ideology.

In 1942 as a conscientious objector he bought a farm in Thelnethan in Sussex and set up a commune for fellow objectors to be run on co-operative lines. The experiment had mixed results, and it ended up with Murry managing it as a conventional farm on commercial lines.

He maintained his pacifist views consistently through the Second World War and became the editor of Peace News from 1940 to 1946. He also published biographical studies of Keats, John Clare, and Jonathan Swift.

Later he renounced pacifism and advocated a preventative war against the Soviet Union. He became a Conservative voter, an anti-feminist, and died in 1957 at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk.

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Jorge Luis Borges biography

December 6, 2010 by Roy Johnson

essayist, librarian, master of the modern short story

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) – full name Jorge Francisco Isodoro Luis Borges Acevedo – was born in Buenos Aires Argentina into an educated middle-class family. His father was a lawyer and a teacher of psychology who was part Spanish, part Portuguese, and half English. His mother was Uruguayan of Spanish descent. They lived in a lower-class suburb famous for its cabarets, brothels, knife fights and the tango.

He grew up in a house speaking both English and Spanish (as a child he thought they were the same language) and was he taught at home until he was eleven years old. The family lived in a large house with over one thousand volumes in English in its library. Despite the raffish nature of the neighbourhood, Borges reflected later in life that the two principal features of his childhood were his father’s library and a large garden – both of which feature prominently in his writing.

When he was only nine years old Borges translated Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince into Spanish, and it was published in a local journal. His friends all thought it was the work of his father.

In 1914 the family moved to Geneva, Switzerland where his father was seeking treatment for his failing eyesight. Borges attended school, learned French, read Carlyle in English, and began to study philosophy in German. The family travelled to Spain, and because of political unrest in Argentina at the time, decided to stay in Switzerland during the war.

Jorge Luis Borges received his baccalauréate from the College de Geneve in 1918. The family stayed in Europe after the war, living in Lugano, Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and Madrid. Whilst in Spain Borges became attracted to the avant garde Ultraist literary movement inspired by Appolinaire and Marinetti. He also published his first poems.

In 1921 the family returned to Buenos Aires, where Borges published his first collection of poems Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923) a sixty-four page booklet paid for by his father and with a cover designed by his sister Norah. There was no profit made from this enterprise: he simply gave the book away to anybody who was interested. He produced journalism, essays, and book reviews, and contributed to the avant-garde review Martin Fierro.

The family returned to Switzerland in 1923 so that his father could resume treatment for his eyes, and when they returned to Argentina the following year, Borges discovered that he had developed a reputation as poet on the strength of his first book. In 1929 his book Cuaderno San Martin won a Municipal Prize, the prize money for which he spent on a complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica.

In 1931 Borges began publishing in the literary journal Sur established by Victoria Ocampo, which helped him to establish his literary reputation. He wrote works including parodies of detective stories with another Argentinean writer Adolfo Bioy Casares under the name H. Bustos Domecq. He also began to explore existential themes in his work, drawing a great deal of his inspiration not from his own personal life, but from his experience of literature.

He was appointed editor at the literary supplement of newspaper Critica in 1933 where he published works that were a blend of non-fictional essays and short stories. These were later collected under the title of A Universal History of Infamy (1936). The collection explored two types of writing. The first used a combination of the essay and the short story to tell what were really true stories. The second were literary spoofs or forgeries – texts which he passed off as translations of little-known works, but which were in fact his own inventions.

In 1935 he published the prototype of what is now considered a typical ‘Borgesian’ short story – ‘The Approach to Mu’tasim – a review of an imaginary novel. He had been influenced by his reading of Thomas Carlyle’s Sator Resartus, a book comprised of reflections on the work and life of an imaginary German philosopher. It is a mark of Borges preference for shorter literary genres (and what he jokingly called his ‘laziness’) that rather than creating complete imaginary works, he thought it was more inventive to conjure up their existence by writing reviews of them as if they actually existed.

Between 1936 and 1939 he wrote a weekly column for El Hogar, and in 1939 found work as an assistant in the Buenos Aires Municipal Library. His duties were so light he could complete them in the first hour. He spent the rest of the day in the basement, writing and translating the work of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner into Spanish. His first volume of short stories The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) collected work he had previously published in Sur.

His eyesight began to fade in the late 1930s and, unable to support himself as a writer, he began giving public lectures. He lived with his widowed mother, who became his personal secretary. Although he relied a great deal on his imaginative responses to literature, he never learned to read Braille. He became completely blind by the late 1950s.

When Juan Peron came to power in 1946 Borges was ‘promoted’ to the job of Inspector of Rabbits and Poultry in the Public Markets, a post from which he immediately resigned. He was elected to the presidency of the Argentine Writer’s Society in 1950 and given the job of director of the National Library in 1955, even though he was by that time completely blind.

Some of his work was translated into English during the 1940s and 1950s, but his international reputation dates from the early 1960s when he was awarded the International Publisher’s Prize, the Prix Formentor – which he shared with Samuel Beckett. He was appointed for a year to the Chair of literature at the University of Texas at Austin, and went on to give lecture tours in America and Europe.

Two major anthologies of his work were published in 1962 – Ficciones and Layrinths – which further enhanced his international reputation. In 1967 Borges embarked on a five year period of collaboration with the American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni which helped to make his work better known in the English-speaking world.

Then in 1967 Jorge Luis Borges married an old friend Elsa Astete Millan who had become a widow, but the marriage only lasted three years. Borges went back to his mother, with whom he lived until her death at the age of almost one hundred. He travelled extensively on lecture tours, and published further collections of his work – The Book of Sand, Dr Brodie’s report, and The Book of Imaginary Beings.

In 1986, a few months before his death, he married his literary assistant Maria Kodama, who thereby gained control of his literary estate and the considerable income from it. Despite international protests, she rescinded all publishing rights for the existing collections of his work and commissioned new translations.

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Joseph Conrad and Cinema

May 22, 2016 by Roy Johnson

film adaptations of Joseph Conrad’s novels and stories

Joseph Conrad and Cinema (literature and film) might seem an odd juxtaposition of genres, but in fact almost a hundred adaptations of Conrad’s works have been made for cinema and television. His work has also been transposed to works for opera and for television. The following selection was made on the basis of films which are currently available in DVD format.

There seem to be three theories of adaptation from prose narrative to cinema – just as there are three notions of translation from one language to another. The film critic Geoffrey Wagner described these as transposition, commentary, and analogy.

The first (transposition) is used to describe an attempt to make the cinematic adaptation of a literary text as accurate and as close to the original as possible in the language of film. This means that there will be no significant additions, deletions, or changes to the original.

The second (commentary) allows for the raw materials of a narrative to be rearranged or used as the basis for a re-interpretation of the basic story line. In this case the sequence of events in a drama might be given a different chronological arrangement, or its characters given new descriptions or motivations.

In the third (analogy) the source materials are used as the inspiration for a completely new creation which acts as an analogy or a metaphor of the original. In this case a story might be transposed to a different historical period or a different cinematic genre. The original will still be recognised, but it is being used for a different purpose.

Victory (novel 1913 – film 1996)

This was the first of Joseph Conrad’s works to be turned into a film when an American silent movie version was released in 1919. A second version appeared in 1930 produced by Paramount with the title Dangerous Paradise, which was one of the earliest films with a sound track recorded at sea. There was another Paramount version in 1940 directed by John Cromwell.

Coming from the Hollywood world of popular entertainment, it is not surprising that these three film versions focus their attention on the sentimental romantic link between a heroic protagonist (Heyst) and the threatened heroine (Alma) whom he rescues. The emphasis of the film versions is on exotic locations and a conventional love story. All three adaptations conclude with the very un-Conradian device of a happy ending – which completely destroys the bitter dramatic ironies in the events and personal tragedies of the original text. Later versions such as the 1996 adaptation below remain more faithful to the original plot.

Directed and adapted by Mark Peploe. Starring – Willem Dafoe (Axel Heyst), Sam Neil (Mr Jones), Rufus Sewell (Martin Ricardo), Irene Jacob (Alma), Simon Callow (Zangiacomo), Jean Yanne (Wilhelm Schomberg), and Mark Patterson (Captain Davidson). This version was filmed in Java.

Victory – DVD film adaptation – Amazon UK

Details of the film – at the Internet Movie Database

Victory – a tutorial and study guide

Victory – Oxford Classics- Amazon UK

Victory – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

The Secret Agent (novel 1907 – film 1936)

One of the most celebrated adaptations of a Conrad text is Alfred Hitchcock’s version of The Secret Agent, which was re-named Sabotage (1936) for cinema release in England. This was to distinguish it from Hitchcock’s other film Secret Agent based on the Ashenden stories by Somerset Maugham which was produced in the same year. When Sabotage was released two months later in the United States it was re-named yet again as The Woman Alone. This proved unpopular, so the original title was restored.

Hitchcock takes enormous liberties with the substance of Conrad’s deeply ironic political thriller: He invents a positive hero (the police sergeant, Ted); he creates a romantic liaison with the main female character Winnie Verloc; and he even gives the story a happy ending.

Hitchcock plays down the collusion that exists in the novel between government and anarchists, and the upper class society in which representatives of both groups circulate. And in a typical piece of self-reference, he transposes Verloc’s seedy newsagent’s shop (selling pornography) to a cinema.

Despite these changes, the film captures some of the tone of the original text – largely because Hitchcock, like Conrad, is fond of using irony – in his case visual juxtapositions that create a satirical author’s point of view on events – something with which Conrad’s text is drenched from start to finish.

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Screenplay by Charles Bennett. Starring – Sylvia Sidney (Winnie Verloc), Oscar Homulka (Adolf Verloc), John Loder (Sergeant Ted), and Desmond Tester (Stevie). Filmed at Gainsborough Studios, London.

Sabotage – Hitchcock’s 1936 film adaptation – Amazon UK

Details of the film – the Internet Movie Database

The Secret Agent – a tutorial and study guide

The Secret Agent – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

The Secret Agent – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

A 1996 version, written and directed by Christopher Hampton, stays reasonably close to the original story line, but despite an all-star (yet ill-assorted) cast the result is a less than convincing whole – which probably accounts for the film’s mediocre rating of 50% at Rotten Tomatoes.

Directed by Christopher Hampton, screenplay by Christopher Hampton, with music by Philip Glass. Starring – Bob Hoskins (Adolf Verloc), Patricia Arquette (Winnie Verloc), Gerard Depardieu (Ossipon), Jim Broadbent (Chief Inspector Heat), Eddie Izzard (Vladimir), Robin Williams (The Professor). Filmed in Ealing Studios and Greenwich, London.

The Secret Agent – 1996 film adaptation on DVD – Amazon UK

Heart of Darkness (novella 1902 – film 1979)

Without doubt the best known cinematic adaptation of Conrad’s work is
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), his version of Heart of Darkness. It is successful precisely because it is not a faithful reproduction of the original novella, but a very imaginative interpretation of it.

The film realization transforms events from Europe’s imperialist exploitation of the Belgian Congo to America’s war in Vietnam in the 1960s. Even so, it remains amazingly faithful to the original. The narrator Marlow becomes Captain Willard, who is sent on a mission to terminate (‘with extreme prejudice’) the command of rogue Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, who has gone over the border into Cambodia with a band of followers.

It is worth noting that the film exists in a number of different versions – because it was edited several times. Minor variations aside, the most significant alternative option is called Apocalypse Now – Redux. This extended version includes a long sequence that was cut from the original where Willard visits an old French colonial plantation. I have watched both versions several times, and in my opinion the inclusion of the French plantation episode slows down the film and retards its dramatic momentum.

The only other point of note is that the film was originally distributed with two separate endings. In one, Willard kills Kurtz then returns to his boat and calls in an air strike which will (presumably) destroy the encampment. In the other he merely switches off the radio that is trying to contact him, and he sails away, back down river.

Director Francis Ford Coppola. Screenplay by Coppola and John Milius. Starring – Marlon Brando (Colonel Kurtz), Robert Duval (Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore), Martin Sheen (Captain Willard), Dennis Hopper (Photo Journalist), Harrison Ford (Colonel Lucas), Sam Bottoms (Lance Johnson). Filmed in the Philippines.

Apocalypse Now – 1979 DVD film – Amazon UK

Details of the film – the Internet Movie Database

Heart of Darkness – a tutorial and study guide

Heart of Darkness – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Heart of Darkness – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

In 1939 Orson Welles planned to make a film version of Heart of Darkness, but the project ran over budget and ultimately was abandoned. Welles turned the adaptation into a work for radio, and the following year made Citizen Kane instead.

There is also a 1994 version by the English director Nicholas Roeg that stays reasonably close to the original narrative. This stars John Malkovich (Kurtz) and Tim Roth (Marlow), with James Fox in a supporting role. This adaptation was made for Ted Turner’s television network. Filmed in Belize and London, UK.

Heart of Darkness – 1994 DVD film – Amazon UK

Lord Jim (novel 1900 – film 1965)

This 1965 adaptation of Lord Jim by Richard Brooks turns the dark moral complexities of the original novel into an epic action-adventure story shot in wide-screen Technicolour. It also reduces the fragmented temporal arrangement of events into a simplified linear narrative, as well as blending some of the characters. There is also considerable simplification of the political and racial issues of the original narrative. Moreover, the central figure is transformed and loses all semblance of ambiguity. As the critic Gene M. Moore observes: ‘The Jim of the film is a conscious political activist in the style of the sixties, a determined man of action, quite unlike Conrad’s ‘romantic’ protagonist.’

Directed and adapted by Richard Brooks. Starring – Peter O’Toole (Jim), James Mason (Gentleman Brown), Curt Jurgens (Cornelius), Eli Wallach (The General), Jack Hawkins (Marlow), Dalia Lavi (The Girl), and Akim Tamiroff (Schomberg). Filmed in Hong Kong and Cambodia, with additional scenes in Shepperton Studios, London.

Lord Jim – DVD – Amazon UK

Details of the film – at the Internet Movie Database

Lord Jim – a tutorial and study guide

Lord Jim – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Lord Jim – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

An Outcast of the Islands (novel 1896 – film 1951)

This is highly regarded amongst film critics as an acceptable combination of a faithful account of the original text with a persuasive film in its own right. Director Carol Reed sticks closely to the plot of the original novel, although he completely changes the geographic locations of the action. He also disregards some of the racial details which are an important part of ethnic tensions in the original narrative.

However, the most glaring difference between the novel and its adaptation is that Reed only uses four of the book’s five parts. In the original text, the protagonist Willems is killed by his mistress the native girl Alssa when his wife Joanna suddenly arrives, whereas in the film Willems is merely banished to live in isolation. This weaker ending was probably a concession to the Hollywood Production Code which prevailed at the time for films shown in the USA. This was a set of moral guidelines (also known as the Hays Code) which specified what was and was not acceptable for on-screen viewing. These rules included forbidding the depiction of crimes that go unpunished.

Directed by Carol Reed, screenplay by William Fairchild, with music by Brian Easdale. Filmed in Sri Lanka and Shepperton Studios, London. Starring – Ralph Richardson (Captain Lingard), Trevor Howard (Peter Willems), Wendy Hiller (Mrs Almayer), Wilfred Hyde White (Mr Vinck), Kerima (Alssa). Filmed in Sri Lanka and Shepperton Studios, London.

An Outcast of the Islands – DVD film adaptation – Amazon UK

Details of the film – at Internet Movie Database

An Outcast of the Islands – a tutorial and study guide

An Outcast of the Islands – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

An Outcast of the Islands – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Amy Foster (story 1901 – film 1997)

This is one of Conrad’s long short stories – some might call it a novella – which was adapted in 1997 by (Baroness) Beeban Kidron as a feature film (originally re-named Swept from the Sea). It tells the story of a poor economic migrant from Eastern Europe who is the sole survivor of a shipwreck in the English Channel. He has lost everything, is hungry, wretched, and knows no English. The local inhabitants regard him as a madman, shun him, and throw stones at him. He is befriended by Amy Foster and settles down with her to create a family. But what appears to be a tale of positive redemption turns into a grim parable of a pessimistic or even tragic view of the world.

Director: Beeban Kidron. Screenplay: Tim Willocks.. Starring – Vincent Perez (Yanko Gooral), Ian McKellan (Dr James Kennedy), Kathy Bates (Mrs Swaffer), Rachel Weisz (Amy Foster), Joss Ackland (Mr Swaffer), and Zoe Wannamaker (Mary Foster). British/American, Tapson Steel Films and Phoenix Pictures. Filmed in Cornwall, UK.

Amy Foster – DVD film adaptation – Amazon UK

Details of the film – at Internet Movie Database

Amy Foster – a tutorial and study guide

Amy Foster – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Amy Foster – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Amy Foster – Kindle eBook (includes screenplay)

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Joseph Conrad biography

September 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

timeline of life, career, and literary works

1857. Joseph Conrad (full original name Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) born December 3 in Berdichev (or vicinity) to Apollo Nalecz Korzeniowski and Evelina (Ewa) Bobrowska. Poland at that time is under the control of Russia.

1862. Conrad’s father exiled to Russia because of his political liberalism, accompanied by his wife and son.

1865. Conrad’s mother dies. Conrad taken into care of maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski.

1869. Conrad and his father return to Cracow. Father dies. Conrad sporadically attends school in Cracow.

1873. Leaves for a three-month-long stay in Switzerland and northern Italy. Announces his wish to have a career at sea, which the family resists.

1874. Leaves Cracow for Marseilles to begin life as a sailor on French ships.

1875. Apprentice on the Mont-Blanc, bound for Martinique.

1876-77. From January to July in Marseilles; from July to February 1877 on schooner Saint-Antoine to West Indies.

1877. Acquires (with three other men) the tartane, the Tremolino which carries arms illegally to the supporters of Don Carlos, the Spanish pretender. Conrad probably escaping from gambling debts accrued in Monte Carlo.

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.

1878-79. Mounting financial problems. In February attempts suicide by shooting himself through the chest (which he later passed off as injury in a duel). Uncle Bobrowski pays off his debts and arranges for him to be transferred to England. On April 24 leaves Marseilles on British steamer Mavis. On June 18 sets foot in England at Lowestoft. Serves as ordinary seaman on coaster The Skimmer of the Sea.

1883. Passes mate’s examination on July 4. Meets uncle Bobrowski at Marienbad. Mate on the sailing ship Riversdale.

1884. Second mate on the Narcissus, bound from Bombay to Dunkirk.

1885-86. Second mate on the Tilkhurst; August 19, receives British certificate of naturalization. November 11, passes examination, receives his ‘Certificate of Competency as Master’. His first story, ‘The Black Mate’, submitted to Tit-Bits.

1887. First mate on Highland Forest. Hurt by a falling spar, hospitalized in Singapore (experience recalled in Lord Jim). Second mate on steamship Vidar (Singapore-Borneo).

1888. On Melita (bound for Bangkok), then his first command on the barque the Otago (Bangkok-Sydney-Mauritius-Port Adelaide). Experiences described in The Shadow-Line, Victory, The Secret Sharer. A Smile of Fortune, and other works.

1889. Summer in London; begins writing Almayer’s Folly.

1890. First trip to Poland since he left in 1874. In May he leaves for the Congo. Second in command, then in command of S. S. Roi de Belges.

1891-93. First mate on Torrens. English passenger (Jacques) reads the first nine chapters of Almayer’s Folly, offers encouragement; meets John Galsworthy aboard the ship. Visits uncle Bobrowski in Poland.

1893-94. Second mate on Adowa (London-Rouen-London). Ends his career as seaman on January 14.

1894. Uncle Bobrowski dies on January 29, 1894. In April Conrad sends Almayer’s Folly to T. Fisher Unwin.

1894-95. Writes An Outcast of the Islands.

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.

1896. March 24, marries Jessie George.

1897. Completes The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’; friendship with R. B. Cunninghame Graham.

1898. Son Alfred Borys born January 14. In October moves to Petit Farm, Kent.

1899. In February completes Heart of Darkness.

1900. Finishes Lord Jim.

1904. Nostromo. Writes the memoir The Mirror of the Sea. Wife falls ill, and becomes practically an invalid.

1905. Spends four months in Europe.

1906. Spends two months in France. Second son John Alexander born August 2.

1907. Children ill in France. Returns to Pent Farm in August. The Secret Agent.

1908. A Set of Six (short stories).

1910. In June moves to Capel House, Kent. Seriously ill.

1911. Under Western Eyes.

1912. ‘Twixt Land and Sea, Tales.

1913-14. Chance. Writes Victory. Leaves for Poland in July 1914; meets Stefan Zeromski in Zakopane; caught by the war in August; escapes and returns to Capel House November 3.

1915. Victory. Within the Tides.

1916. Borys fights on the French front.

1917. The Shadow-Line. Writes prefaces for a new collected edition of his works.

1918. Borys, gassed and wounded, is hospitalized in Le Havre.

1919. The Arrow of Gold. Moves to Oswalds, Bishopbourne, near Canterbury, where he spends the last years of his life.

1920. The Rescue.

1921. Visits Corsica. Notes on Life and Letters.

1923. Visits New York (April-June). Reading from his Victory at home of Mrs. Arthur Curtiss James, May 10. The Secret Agent, Drama in Four Acts (adaptation of the novel). The Rover. Laughing Anne, a play (adaptation of “Because of the Dollars”).

1924. Jacob Epstein does Conrad’s bust. In May Conrad declines knighthood. Health deteriorates and he is bedridden. His wife is also ill. Both sons and Richard Curle are with them. Dies of heart attack 3 August. Buried in Canterbury.

1925. Suspense (incomplete). Tales of Hearsay.

1926. Last Essays.

1928. The Sisters (written in 1896; incomplete.)

1936. Jessie Conrad dies 6 December. Buried near her husband at Canterbury.

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

Joseph Conrad close reading

March 18, 2014 by Roy Johnson

how to read and analyse a text

In literary studies there are various types of close reading. It is possible and rewarding to scrutinise a text closely, keeping any number of its features in mind. These can reveal various layers of significance in the work which might not be apparent on a superficial reading. You might focus attention on the text’s –

language
meaning
structure
philosophy

The most advanced forms of close reading combine all these features in an effort to reveal the full and even hidden meanings in a work. The following tutorial shows a very simple form of close reading. It pays attention to the first two of these approaches – looking at the language that Conrad uses and how it is closely linked to what we know about the text.

This type of exercise can only be successful once the text has been read in its entirety. You need a grasp of the events and the story as a whole before it is possible to see how its meaning(s) are built up from small linguistic features of the narrative.

The Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov once observed ‘Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only re-read it’. What he meant by this apparently contradictory remark is that the first time we read a text we are busy absorbing information, and we cannot appreciate all the subtle connections there may be between its parts – because we don’t yet have the complete picture before us. Only when we read it for a second time (or even better, a third or fourth) are we in a position to assemble and compare the nuances of meaning and the significance of its details in relation to each other.

This is why the activity is called ‘close reading’. You should try to get used to the notion of reading and re-reading very carefully, scrupulously, and in great detail.

The extract which follows is the opening 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.

An Outpost of Progress

An Outpost of Progress – the opening lines

There were two white men in charge of the trading station. Kayerts, the chief, was short and fat; Carlier, the assistant, was tall, with a large head and a very broad trunk perched upon a long pair of thin legs. The third man on the staff was a Sierra Leone nigger, who maintained that his name was Henry Price. However, for some reason or other, the natives down the river had given him the name of Makola, and it stuck to him through all his wanderings about the country. He spoke English and French with a warbling accent, wrote a beautiful hand, understood bookkeeping, and cherished in his innermost heart the worship of evil spirits. His wife was a negress from Loanda, very large and very noisy. Three children rolled about in sunshine before the door of his low, shed-like dwelling. Makola, taciturn and impenetrable, despised the two white men. He had charge of a small clay storehouse with a dried-grass roof, and pretended to keep a correct account of beads, cotton cloth, red kerchiefs, brass wire, and other trade goods it contained. Besides the storehouse and Makola’s hut, there was only one large building in the cleared ground of the station. It was built neatly of reeds, with a verandah on all the four sides. There were three rooms in it. The one in the middle was the living-room, and had two rough tables and a few stools in it. The other two were the bedrooms for the white men. Each had a bedstead and a mosquito net for all furniture. The plank floor was littered with the belongings of the white men; open half-empty boxes, torn wearing apparel, old boots; all the things dirty, and all the things broken, that accumulate mysteriously round untidy men. There was also another dwelling-place some distance away from the buildings. In it, under a tall cross much out of the perpendicular, slept the man who had seen the beginning of all this; who had planned and had watched the construction of this outpost of progress.

Close reading

01. ‘White men’ is significant because the story is about the exploitation of black Africans by white Europeans. And ‘in charge’ is mildly ironic because we rapidly learn that they are only nominally in charge. It is their African assistant Makola who really determines what goes on, whilst they are hopelessly incompetent.

02. The names ‘Kayerts’ and ‘Carlier’ tell us that the setting of the story is the Belgian Congo. Carlier is a French name, Kayerts is Flemish, and these are the two linguistic groups which comprise Belgium. The physical descriptions contrast the two men in a way that makes them slightly ridiculous, rather like the fat and thin man of comedy stereotypes. The term ‘perched’ reinforces this.

03. ‘Maintained’ suggests just the opposite – that Makola has given himself the name Henry Price because he wants to identify his interests with those of his European employers. Conrad’s use of the racist term ‘nigger’ would have been considered unremarkable in 1897 when he wrote the story.

04. The natives call him ‘Makola’ — and so does Conrad, which reinforces our interpretation of the previous sentence. His ‘wanderings’ suggest that he is experienced.

05. Makola speaks two foreign languages in addition to his own native African language and his wife’s, which would be different. He is also a skilled clerk. Thus he has absorbed European culture, in contrast to the two Europeans, who are completely incapable of absorbing his culture. Yet he still worships evil spirits. He has a foot in both cultures.

06. Loanda is on the coast of Angola, close to what was once called the ‘Slave Coast’. This is why it is ‘Mrs Price’ who understands what the slave traders are saying later in the story.

07. ‘Rolled about’ suggests that the children are at ease in their natural environment. ‘Shed-like’ tells us how poor their accommodation is.

08. ‘Impenetrable’ (a typically Conradian term) suggests that he keeps his feelings and motivation well hidden. It is a similar term to those which Conrad uses later to describe the topographical surroundings – ‘hopeless’ and ‘irresistible’. Such details contribute to why Africa in a moral sense defeats Europe in the story. ‘Despised’ however is a key insight into Makola’s judgement and feelings: this points to the element of racial conflict in the story.

09. We notice that the ‘trade goods’ are an assortment of cheap rubbish. They are being traded for ivory, which is a precious commodity in Europe. The Africans are therefore being cheated by the Europeans. But ‘pretended’ tells us that Makola might be engaged in a little cooking-of-the-books on his own account.

10. ‘Only one large building’: this is a very undeveloped trading station, and its isolation is emphasised.

11. ‘Neatly’ and ‘verandah’ contrast sharply with Makola’s ‘shed-like’ dwelling. In other words, the Europeans have the better accommodation.

12. The furniture is sparse, but the two men have a room each.

13. The mosquito net would be very important: they are close to the equator , and therefore a long way from their European homeland.

14. Notice how the two men do not know how to look after themselves. The floor is ‘littered’ with their ‘broken’ and ‘dirty’ goods. And how inappropriate some of those goods are: they have brought ‘town wearing apparel’ when they are in the tropics.

15. ‘Dwelling place’ is another irony of Conrad’s as the narrator of the story. What he is referring to is the grave of the first station chief who has died of fever. So, Africa has already killed off one representative of Europe when the story opens.

16. Conrad piles on more grim humour with the expression that the first director ‘slept’ under the cross – an ironic euphemism given that the director is dead. There is also a neat structural link here – because this is also the location of the story’s ending, where Kayerts will commit suicide, hanging himself on the cross.

Studying 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 starts off with simple issues of language, then progresses to more complex literary criticism.The 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 on this site was written by the same author.
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Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Joseph Conrad – video biography

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Lord 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.
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Heart 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’.
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Joseph Conrad web 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.

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

Joseph Conrad critical bibliography

June 30, 2010 by Roy Johnson

selected literary criticism and commentary

Amar Acheraiou, Joseph Conrad and the Reader, London: Macmillan, 2009.

Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Muriel Bradbrook, Joseph Conrad: Poland’s English Genius, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941

Harold Bloom (ed), Joseph Conrad (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010.

Martin Bock and Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad and Psychological Medicine, Texas Tech Press, 2002.

Hillel M. Daleski, Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession, London: Faber, 1977

Stephen Donovan, Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Wilfred S. Dowden, Joseph Conrad: The Imagined Style, Vanderbilt University Press, 1970.

Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Adam Gillon and Raymond Brebach, Joseph Conrad: Comparative Essays, Texas Tech Press, 1993.

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

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

Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992.

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

G.G. Harpham, One of Us: Mastery of Joseph Conrad, Chicago University Press, 1997..

Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness, London: Edward Arnold, 1979.

Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, London: Edward Arnold, 1990.

Jeremy Hawthorn, Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, London: Continuum, 2007.

Owen Knowles, The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Jakob Lothe, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008.

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

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

Jeffery Myers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Cooper Square Publishers, 2001.

Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, Camden House, 2007.

Lindsay Newman and Yves Hervouet, The French Face of Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Kieron O’Hara, Joseph Conrad Today, Imprint Academic, 2007.

George A. Panichas, Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, Mercer University Press, 2005.

John G. Peters, The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

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

Richard J. Ruppel, Homosexuality in the Life and Work of Joseph Conrad: Love Between the Lines, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966.

Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966.

Norman Sherry, Joseph Conrad: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1997.

Allan H. Simmons, Joseph Conrad: (Critical Issues), London: Macmillan, 2006.

Allan H. Simmons, Joseph Conrad in Context, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

J.H. Stape, The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, Arrow Books, 2008.

Peter Villiers, Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner, Seafarer Books, 2006.

Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980.

Cedric Watts, Joseph Conrad: (Writers and their Work), London: Northcote House, 1994.

Andrea White, Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition, Cambridge University Press, 2008.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Almayer’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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An 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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Lord 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.
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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.

Nostromo (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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The 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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Under 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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Chance 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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Victory (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.
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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.

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

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.

An Outpost of Progress

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.

Studying 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

Sample close reading of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House

Sample close reading of Katherine Mansfield’s The Voyage

Sample close reading of Virginia Woolf’s Monday or Tuesday

Other novels by Joseph Conrad

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.

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

John Maynard Keynes biography

economist and government political adviser

Bloomsbury Group – web links

John Middleton Murry

poet, critic, pacifist, publisher

Jorge Luis Borges biography

essayist, librarian, master of the modern short story

Joseph Conrad and Cinema

film adaptations of Joseph Conrad’s novels and stories

Joseph Conrad biography

timeline of life, career, and literary works

Joseph Conrad links

Joseph Conrad close reading

how to read and analyse a text

An Outpost of Progress – the opening lines

Close reading

Further reading

Joseph Conrad – video biography

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad web links

Joseph Conrad critical bibliography

selected literary criticism and commentary

Joseph Conrad links

Joseph Conrad criticism

annotated bibliography of criticism and comment

Joseph Conrad greatest works

introductions, with links to tutorials and study guides

Joseph Conrad links

Joseph Conrad prose style

how to start analysing prose style

Sample text

Joseph Conrad prose style – analysis

Close reading exercises

Other novels by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad links

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