Conrad's Fiction as Critical Discourse

Conrad's Fiction as Critical Discourse PDF Author: Richard Ambrosini
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521403498
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Joseph Conrad's comments about his works have commonly been dismissed as theoretically unsophisticated, while the critical notions of James, Woolf and Joyce have come to shape our understanding of the modern novel. Richard Ambrosini's study of Conrad's Fiction as Critical Discourse makes an original claim for the importance of his theoretical ideas as they are formed, tested, and eventually redefined in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Setting the narrator's discourse in these tales in the context of the dynamic interplay of Conrad's fictional with his non-fictional writings, and of the transformations in his narrative forms, Ambrosini defines Conrad's view of fiction and the artistic ideal underlying his commitment as a writer in a new and challenging way. Conrad's innovatory techniques as a novelist are shown in the continuity of his theoretical enterprise, from the early search for an artistic prose and a personal novel form, to the later dislocations of perspective achieved by manipulation of conventions drawn from popular fiction. This reassessment of Conrad's critical thought offers a new perspective on the transition from the Victorian novel to contemporary fiction.

Conrad's Fiction as Critical Discourse

Conrad's Fiction as Critical Discourse PDF Author: Richard Ambrosini
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521403498
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Joseph Conrad's comments about his works have commonly been dismissed as theoretically unsophisticated, while the critical notions of James, Woolf and Joyce have come to shape our understanding of the modern novel. Richard Ambrosini's study of Conrad's Fiction as Critical Discourse makes an original claim for the importance of his theoretical ideas as they are formed, tested, and eventually redefined in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Setting the narrator's discourse in these tales in the context of the dynamic interplay of Conrad's fictional with his non-fictional writings, and of the transformations in his narrative forms, Ambrosini defines Conrad's view of fiction and the artistic ideal underlying his commitment as a writer in a new and challenging way. Conrad's innovatory techniques as a novelist are shown in the continuity of his theoretical enterprise, from the early search for an artistic prose and a personal novel form, to the later dislocations of perspective achieved by manipulation of conventions drawn from popular fiction. This reassessment of Conrad's critical thought offers a new perspective on the transition from the Victorian novel to contemporary fiction.

Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism

Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism PDF Author: Mark Wollaeger
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804766819
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
"You want more scepticism at the very foundation of your work. Scepticism, the tonic of minds, the tonic of life, the agent of truth - the way of art and salvation." Joseph Conrad wrote these words to John Galsworthy in 1901, and this study argues that Conrad's skepticism forms the basis of his most important works, participating in a tradition of philosophical skepticism that extends from Descartes to the present. Conrad's epistemological and moral skepticism - expressed, forestalled, mitigated, and suppressed - provides the terms for the author's rethinking of the peculiar relation between philosophy and literary form in Conrad's writing and, more broadly, for reconsidering what it means to call any novel 'philosophical'. Among the issues freshly argued are Conrad's thematics of coercion, isolation, and betrayal; the complicated relations among author, narrator, and character; and the logic of Conradian romance, comedy, and tragedy. The author also offers a new way of conceptualizing the shape of Conrad's career, especially the 'decline' evidenced in the later fiction. The uniqueness of Conrad's multifarious literary and cultural inheritance makes it difficult to locate him securely in the dominant tradition of the British novel. A philosophical approach to Conrad, however, reveals links to other novelists - notably Hardy, Forster, and Woolf - all of whom share in the increasing philosophical burden of the modern novel by enacting the very philosophical issues that are discussed within their pages. Conrad's interest as a skeptic is heightened by the degree to which he resists the insights proffered by his own skepticism. The first chapter introduces the idea of the Conradian 'shelter', and the next two use Schopenhauer to show how the language of metaphysical speculation in Tales of Unrest and 'Heart of Darkness' spills over into a religious impulse that resists the disintegrating effect of Conrad's skepticism. The author then turns to Hume to model the authorial skepticism that in Lord Jim contests the continuing visionary strain of the earlier fiction and Descartes to analyze the ways in which Romantic vision is more stringently chastened by irony in Nostromo and The Secret Agent. The concluding chapter touches on several late novels before examining how competing models of political agency in Conrad's last great fiction of skepticism, Under Western Eyes, situate it somewhere between ideology critique and a mystified account of the exigencies of individual consciousness.

Conrad's Decentered Fiction

Conrad's Decentered Fiction PDF Author: Johan Adam Warodell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316512193
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Brings the vibrant details of Conrad's writing to the forefront for study and analyzes newly-discovered artworks, maps, and manuscript pages.

Solitude Versus Solidarity in the Novels of Joseph Conrad

Solitude Versus Solidarity in the Novels of Joseph Conrad PDF Author: Ursula Lord
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 9780773516700
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
A structural, thematic, and theoretical analysis of several selected novels of Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad, based on ideas rooted in political theory, sociology, and philosophy. The author explores fiction from the years 1885-1905 in terms of critical and theoretical paradigms established by 19th and 20th century thinkers such as Darwin, Weber, Arendt, Mannheim, Marx, and Lukacs. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Realism, Form, and Representation in the Edwardian Novel

Realism, Form, and Representation in the Edwardian Novel PDF Author: Charlotte Jones
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192599801
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
The real represents to my perception the things that we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another', wrote Henry James in 1907. This description, riven with double negatives, hesitation, and uncertainty, encapsulates the epistemological difficulties of realism, for underlying its narrative and descriptive apparatus as an aesthetic mode lies a philosophical quandary. What grounds the 'real' of the realist novel? What kind of perception is required to validate the experience of reality? How does the realist novel represent the difficulty of knowing? What comes to the fore in James's account, as in so many, is how the forms of realism are constituted by a relation to unknowing, absence, and ineffability. Realism, Form, and Representation in the Edwardian Novel recovers a neglected literary history centred on the intricate relationship between fictional representation and philosophical commitment. It asks how—or if—we can conceptualize realist novels when the objects of their representational intentions are realities that might exist beyond what is empirically verifiable by sense data or analytically verifiable by logic, and are thus irreducible to conceptual schemes or linguistic practices—a formulation Charlotte Jones refers to as 'synthetic realism'. In new readings of Edwardian novels including Conrad's Nostromo and The Secret Agent, Wells's Tono-Bungay, and Ford's The Good Soldier, this volume revises and reconsiders key elements of realist novel theory—metaphor and metonymy; character interiority; the insignificant detail; omniscient narration and free indirect discourse; causal linearity—to uncover the representational strategies by which realist writers grapple with the recalcitrance of reality as a referential anchor, and seek to give form to the force, opacity, and uncertain scope of realities that may lie beyond the material. In restoring a metaphysical dimension to the realist novel's imaginary, Realism, Form, and Representation in the Edwardian Novel offers a new conceptualization of realism both within early twentieth-century literary culture and as a transhistorical mode of representation.

Lord Jim

Lord Jim PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004502424
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
"Lord Jim: Centennial Essays" features eight essays by major Conrad scholars to celebrate the centenary of the publication of what is possibly Joseph Conrad's best known novel. This carefully edited volume covers a wide range of topics, and includes new work on the novel's reception and sources, narrative strategies, and thematic interests. Various contemporary critical approaches - Bakhtinian, postcolonial, and historicist - are aired and reconsidered, and a generous selection of documents relating to the Jeddah affair of 1880 sheds light on Conrad's use of real-life materials. The kaleidoscopic perspectives brought to bear on this landmark of literary Modernism will stimulate and challenge both scholars and students alike.

Lord Jim

Lord Jim PDF Author: Allan Simmons
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042012240
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
"Lord Jim: Centennial Essays" features eight essays by major Conrad scholars to celebrate the centenary of the publication of what is possibly Joseph Conrad's best known novel. This carefully edited volume covers a wide range of topics, and includes new work on the novel's reception and sources, narrative strategies, and thematic interests. Various contemporary critical approaches - Bakhtinian, postcolonial, and historicist - are aired and reconsidered, and a generous selection of documents relating to the Jeddah affair of 1880 sheds light on Conrad's use of real-life materials. The kaleidoscopic perspectives brought to bear on this landmark of literary Modernism will stimulate and challenge both scholars and students alike.

The English Book and Its Marginalia

The English Book and Its Marginalia PDF Author: Asako Nakai
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042013643
Category : Books in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This book is about books that recount the story of encountering another book. There are various versions of the story told and retold from the heyday of imperialism up to the present day (Homi Bhabha calls it the trope of 'the discovery of the English book'); by considering each of these versions carefully, we may also give an alternative account of twentieth-century 'English literature' as the site of an intercultural discourse. This project is very much inspired by debate on postcolonial theory, namely, the debate between Said and Bhabha. Part I is devoted to the discussion of Conrad, especially of Heart of Darkness, and investigates how the novella has continually been reproduced to the extent that it represents 'the English Book' of colonial/postcolonial literatures. The chapter on Hugh Clifford (Ch.3) is virtually the first intensive critique of his novels, such as Saleh (1908), with a particular focus on their intertextual relations with Conrad's texts. Part II examines how the story of the English Book is repeated and revised in the texts of the following authors: Joyce Cary, Isak Dinesen, V. S. Naipaul, Kaiko Takeshi, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o.

Culture and the Literary

Culture and the Literary PDF Author: Avishek Parui
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786616017
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Culture and the Literary is a study of how cultural codes are constructed, consumed and conveyed as represented in selected works of fiction and non-fiction. Examining cultural studies as a discipline by revisiting some of its seminal figures, the book includes a study of selected literary as well as non-fictional texts. It offers a unique combination of three major theoretical frames: memory studies, thing theory, and affect studies. Drawing on fictional representations, theoretical frames and historical events, this book aims to provide a unique perspective into how culture as a phenomenon is represented, reified and re-membered in the world we inhabit today.

Studies in Literature in English

Studies in Literature in English PDF Author: Mohit Kumar Ray
Publisher: Atlantic Publishers & Dist
ISBN: 9788126905348
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This Anthology Of As Many As Twenty Essays Offers Us Critiques And Interpretations Of Mainstream British And American Literature, As Well As Addresses The Issue Of Studying Literature Vis-À-Vis Certain Theoretical And Emerging Perspectives Of Our Times.Apart From Fine Analyses Of And Sharp Insights Into British Literature Ranging From Chaucer To Wyatt And Shakespeare, Coleridge And Shelley To Conrad, E.M. Forster And D.H. Lawrence To T.S. Eliot, The Modernist Drama To Golding S Fictional World, We Get A Glimpse Of The Post-War American Scenario As Well; The Anthology Also Introduces Us To Some Of The Interesting Issues And Modern Critical Theories And Trends Which Are Emerging To Be Highly Relevant In Literary Study Today, Thus Reminding Us Once Again That Literature, Indeed, Can Never Be An Isolated Phenomenon.Students, Scholars And General Readers Of English Literature Will Find The Anthology Both Useful And Enjoyable.