This book traces the dialogic relation between Conrad's Eastern fiction and other histories, arguing that it is in the intersections of art and history that we locate Conrad's irony. In a direct response to the visual culture of his times, Conrad sets up his fictional world as a hallucinated mirage stressing the veracity of his own Eastern vision.

This book provides a comprehensive, up-to-date history of the commentary written about the life and works of Joseph Conrad.

This book considers the relationship between sound and silence in the works of Joseph Conrad, along with their ties to Western and non-Western space. Throughout Conrad’s works, a pattern emerges where Western space is associated with sound and non-Western space is associated with silence; similarly, Western space is portrayed as full of objects and activity, whereas non-Western space is portrayed as empty. As these tales progress, though, Conrad’s characters embark on transformational journeys that cause them to reassess the world they live in and sometimes even the nature of the universe. These journeys invariably occur through encountering non-Western space, and during the course of these journeys, the dichotomy between Western space, perceived as replete with sound and activity, and non-Western space, empty of such, blurs such that the fullness of the West is revealed to be simply a surface hiding the emptiness beneath. In the end, both Western and non-Western space are revealed to be absences, as the absence of sound becomes a correlative for the emptiness of space and the emptiness of space becomes a metonym for the cosmological emptiness of nothingness.

Conrad's Secrets explores a range of knowledges which would have been familiar to Conrad and his original readers. Drawing on research into trade, policing, sexual and financial scandals, changing theories of trauma and contemporary war-crimes, the book provides contexts for Conrad's fictions and produces original readings of his work.

Joseph Conrad achieved worldwide literary renown in his third language. Despite not having learned English until his twenties, Conrad succeeded in breaking new ground with his portrayal of anti-heroes & distinctive narrative style, becoming a major influence on 20th century English language fiction.

Andrew Francis' Culture and Commerce in Conrad's Asian Fiction is the first book-length critical study of commerce in Conrad's work. It reveals not only the complex connections between culture and commerce in Conrad's Asian fiction, but also how he employed commerce in characterization, moral contexts, and his depiction of relations at a point of advanced European imperialism. Conrad's treatment of commerce - Arab, Chinese and Malay, as well as European - is explored within a historically specific context as intricate and resistant to traditional readings of commerce as simple and homogeneous. Through the analysis of both literary and non-literary sources, this book examines capitalism, colonialism and globalization within the commercial, political and social contexts of colonial Southeast Asia.

The life of Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski reads like an adventure story, an adventure story written by somebody like Joseph Conrad. The young Conrad dreamed of a life at sea and eventually became a British merchant seaman, working his way up from apprentice to captain on classic three-masted square-rigged barques. He would also become one of the most important novelists in the English language, and almost half of his life's work is set in Southeast Asia. Conrad's favorite destination was the vibrant, bustling port of Singapore as well as the remote ports of the Dutch East Indies, and his early works - Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, Lord Jim and The Rescue - are based on the people and places he encountered in his own voyages on the Vidar, a trading vessel that plied the waters of the Indonesian archipelago from its base in Singapore. In Joseph Conrad's Eastern Voyages, Ian Burnet places Conrad's Malay novels into their proper narrative sequence and explores the backstory of his characters helping the reader to visualize the cultural and historical context of Conrad's time in late 19th-century Southeast Asia.