When Joseph Conrad’s novel Chance appeared in serial form in the New York Herald in 1912 and in book form in 1914 it established the author’s financial security for the first time. Following years of struggle to reach a wide audience for his fiction, Conrad benefitted from the American marketing of this novel for the women readers of romance. Aggressive advertising promoted the writer’s new focus on a female protagonist and Conrad’s division of the story’s location between land and sea. The novel proved popular and lucrative. Yet in spite of its economic success, Chance remains one of Conrad’s less well-known narratives. This fresh new collection of essays from both young and established scholars opens up a lively critical debate taking Chance beyond the status of best-selling romance. In a striking re-evaluation of the novel these writers examine Chance’s innovative narrative strategies, its up-to-the-minute commentary on female politics, contemporary ethics, as well as its antecedents in classical debate and the significance of Conrad’s last use of his seaman narrator Marlow.

The book builds on current interventions in modernist scholarship in order to rethink Joseph Conrad's contribution to literary history. It utilizes emerging critical modernisms, the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, and late modernist fiction, to stage an encounter between Conrad and a radically different literary tradition. It does so in order to uncover critical blind spots that have limited our appreciation of his poetics. The purpose of this investigation is threefold: first, to participate in recent critical attempts to correct a neglect of ontological preoccupations in Conrad's writing and uncover the author's exploration of a human subject beyond the Cartesian cogito. Second, to demonstrate the manner in which such an exploration is accompanied by the reconfiguration of the very building blocks of fiction: character, narration, focalization, language and plot have to be rethought to accommodate a subject who is no longer conceived of as autonomous and whole but is rendered permeable and interdependent. Third, to show how this redrawing of the literary imaginary communicates with the projects of late modernist writers such as Samuel Beckett, writers whose literary endeavours have long been held separate from Conrad's. In the spirit of current re-examinations of modernism and critical endeavours to think it anew outside the commonplaces that once defined it, this study returns to Conrad's art with an eye to twentieth-century shifts in the way we process, understand and evaluate information. Thematic, stylistic and philosophical instantiations of the slow are offered here as a gauge for this meaningful transformation.

In 2024 the literary community commemorates the 100th anniversary of the death of Joseph Conrad. This volume of collected essays takes the opportunity to reflect on Conrad's enduring influence on literature and culture in the 21st century. Offering reflections on Conrad's legacy by leading critics and scholars in the field of Conrad studies as well as by significant figures in the arts and cultural sector, it represents a unique contribution to Conrad studies and provides an overview of how the author continues to inspire and shape contemporary literature and culture in the 21st century. Covering a broad range of topics, from discussions of how Conrad has inspired contemporary films and operas through to the pertinence of his works to current conflicts and key contemporary issues, Joseph Conrad's Cultural Legacy offers unique, original insights into the enduring relevance of one of the leading literary figures of the 20th century.

To write about the sea in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to do so against a vast accretion of past deeds, patterns of thought, and particularly patterns of expression, many of which had begun to feel not just settled but exhausted. The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language takes up this circumstance, showing how prose writers in this period grappled with the super-conventionalized nature of the sea as a setting, as a shaper of plot and character, as a structuring motif, and as a source of metaphor. But while writing about the sea required careful negotiation of multiple andsometimes conflicting associations, the sea's multiplicity and freight function not just as impediments to thought or expression but as sources of intellectual and expressive possibilities. The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language treats a provocatively diverse group of key authors spanning from the 1830s to the 1930s and including both those inextricably associated with the sea (Frederick Marryat, Joseph Conrad) and those whose writings are less obviously marine, such as Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Virginia Woolf. What these writers share, among other things, is that they simultaneously register and turn to account the difficulties that attend writing about, and writing with, the sea. In the process, their sea-writing sheds new light on the value of marginalized representational techniques including repetition, cliché, and imprecision.

The Discerning Narrator sheds new light on Joseph Conrad’s controversial critique of modernity and modernization by reading his work through an Aristotelian lens. The book proposes that we need Aristotle – a key figure in Conrad’s education – to recognize the profound significance of Conrad’s artistic vision. Offering Aristotelian analyses of Conrad’s letters, essays, and four works of fiction, Alexia Hannis illuminates the philosophical roots and literary implications of Conrad’s critique of modernity. Hannis turns to Aristotle’s ethical formulations to trace what she calls "the discerning narrator" in Conrad’s oeuvre: a compassionate yet sceptical guide to appraising character and conduct. The book engages with past and current Conrad scholarship while drawing from Aristotle’s Poetics, Politics, and Nicomachean Ethics, as well as classical scholars to offer original philosophical analyses of major and understudied Conrad’s works. Drawing on Aristotle, Hannis provides a fresh context for making sense of Conrad’s self-differentiation from modernity. As a result, The Discerning Narrator provides an affirmation of literature’s invitation to wonder about the possibilities inherent in human nature, including the potential for painful depravity, heroic excellence, and ordinary human happiness.

The popular yet complex work of Joseph Conrad has attracted much critical attention over the years, from the perspectives of postcolonial, modernist, cultural and gender studies. This guide to his compelling work presents: an accessible introduction to the contexts and many interpretations of Conrad’s texts, from publication to the present an introduction to key critical texts and perspectives on Conrad’s life and work, situated in a broader critical history cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism suggestions for further reading. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Joseph Conrad and seeking not only a guide to his works, but also a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds them.