Joseph Conrad is famous for being an unusual, strange, and even eccentric English writer. However, despite his difference, English criticism has primarily interpreted his fiction from the perspective of the English culture. In turn, Polish criticism has portrayed Conrad as a Pole who happened to write in English. Considering Conrad’s transcultural background, neither exclusively English nor an exclusively Polish writer, this volume investigates the essential features of his expatriate writing as a form distinctly different from any writing done within a single culture. Conrad's unique contribution to English literature and sensibility stems from his ability to incorporate the complexity of the exilic condition without discussing it explicitly. Furthermore, this book establishes Conrad's expatriation archetypes and examines them as they manifest themselves not only in a realistic, but, more importantly, in a symbolic mode. Those archetypal features demonstrate themselves through Conrad’s thematic choices, narrative structure, and critical discourse that reflect his complex relationship with both the parent and the adopted reader. While the existence of these patterns in Conrad's fiction are not entirely obvious, this book aims to illuminate Conrad’s contributions to the current critical debate concerning the place of the author in his/her own narrative.

In 1908, Joseph Conrad was criticised by a reviewer for being a man ‘without either country or language’: even his shipboard communities were the product of a ‘cosmopolitan’ vision. This book takes off from that criticism and begins by exploring the history and meanings of the term ‘cosmopolitan’. It then considers the multinational world of Conrad’s ships – and of the Merchant Marine more generally – to differentiate multinationalism from cosmopolitanism. Subsequent chapters then address nationalism, nation-formation and the concept of the nation through a reading of Nostromo; cosmopolitanism and internationalism in The Secret Agent; nationalism, internationalism and transnational activism in relation to Under Westen Eyes; and Conrad’s own transnational activism in his later essays. While drawing distinctions between cosmopolitanism, internationalism and transnationalism as the appropriate conceptual framings for Conrad’s works, this book traces Conrad’s own engagement with nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and transnational activism in relation to the political events of his time.

Our Henry James in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture addresses the interesting revival of Henry James’s works in Anglo-American film adaptations and contemporary fiction from the 1960s to the present. James’s fiction is generally considered difficult and part of high culture, more appropriate for classroom study than popular appreciation. However, this volume focuses on the adaptation of his novels into films, challenging us to understand James’s popular reputation today on both sides of the Atlantic. The book offers two explanations for his persistent influence: James’s literary ambiguity and his reliance on popular culture. “Part I: His Times” considers James’s reliance on sentimental literature and theatrical melodrama in Daisy Miller, Guy Domville, The Awkward Age, and several of his lesser known short stories. “Part II: Our Times” focuses on how James’s considerations of changing gender roles and sexual identities have influenced Hollywood representations of emancipated women in Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, among others. Recent fiction by authors including James Baldwin and Leslie Marmon Silko also treat Jamesian notions of gender and sexuality while considering his part in contemporary debates about globalization and cosmopolitanism. Both a study of James’s works and a broad range of contemporary film and fiction, Our Henry James in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture demonstrates the continuing relevance of Henry James to our multimedia, interdisciplinary, globalized culture.

Ernest Hemingway and the Fluidity of Gender presents fresh insight into the gender issues and sexual ambiguities that have always been present in Hemingway’s work, utilising a variety of historical, socio-cultural and biographical contexts. Offering a close analysis of the gender issues and sexual ambiguities present in Hemingway’s work, this book provides insight into the position of white middle-class women in America from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, illuminating Hemingway’s androgynous impulses and the attitudinal changes that occurred during Ernest Hemingway’s lifetime. Women and gender were Hemingway’s steady concern; his fictional females are drawn with the same kind of complexity and individuality like his fictional males, manifesting endurance, stoic courage and grace under pressure. This volume highlights Hemingway’s textual world’s resistance of patriarchal phallocratism and his abolition of the binaries of masculinity/femininity, passivity/activity and the like, dismantling binary oppositions involving gender and sexuality. Exploring the metamorphosis of American social and cultural history, this volume unravels the stereotypical myths associated with womanhood and the complexity of women in Ernest Hemingway’s novels. Tania Chakravertty is the Dean of Students’ Welfare, Diamond Harbour Women’s University, West Bengal, India. Chakravertty has a Ph.D. from Calcutta University on “Gender Representations in the Fiction of Ernest Hemingway”. Chakravertty visited the US to participate in the academic group project “Strengthening and Widening the Scope of American Studies: The U.S. Experience” in 2010 as part of the prestigious International Visitor Leadership Program. Her monographs have appeared in national and international journals.

The Life and Works of Korean Poet Kim Myŏng-sun offers an introduction to Korea’s first modern woman writer to publish a collection of creative works, Kim Myŏng-sun (1896–ca. 1954). Despite attempts by male contemporaries to assassinate her character, Kim was an outspoken writer and an early feminist, confronting patriarchal Korean society in essays, plays, poems, and short stories. This volume is the first to offer a detailed analysis in English of Kim’s poetry. The poems examined in this volume can be considered early twentieth-century versions of #MeToo literature, mirroring the harrowing account of her sexual assault, and also subversive challenges to traditional institutions, dealing with themes such as romantic free love, same-sex love, single womanhood, and explicit female desire and passion. The Life and Works of Korean Poet Kim Myŏng-sun restores a long-neglected woman writer to her rightful place in the history of Korean literature, shedding light on the complexity of women’s lives in Korea and contributing to the growing interest in modern Korean women’s literature in the West.

This collection of thirteen essays by writers from several countries lavishly celebrates the centenary of the publication of Conrad's The Secret Agent. It reconsiders one of Conrad's most important political novels from a variety of critical perspectives and presents a stimulating documentary section as well as specially commissioned maps and new contextualizing illustrations. Much new information is provided on the novel's sources, and the work is placed in new several contexts. The volume is essential reading on this novel both for students studying it as a set text as well as for scholars of the late-Victorian and early Modernist periods.

This volume is a study of eight major novels from the postwar period (1945-65) in conjunction with the films made from them during a later period of a little less than three decades straddling the millennium (1985-2012). The comparison of these novels (by Ken Kesey, Paul Bowles, Carson McCullers, Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin, Alexander Trocchi, William Burroughs, and Peter Matthiessen) with their film adaptations offers the opportunity for a historical reassessment not only of the novels themselves but also of the global counterculture of the years 1965-75, which they prefigure in a variety of ways. Appearing more than a decade after the waning of the counterculture and in some cases as much as fifty years after the novels on which they are based, the films display significant revisions and omissions prompted by the historical and cultural changes of the intervening years. Whereas these changes are nowadays often interpreted in purely political terms, this book argues that the religious theme of mystery and its decline is central to the novels and films and is a key feature of the period of cultural transformation that they bookend. At once a work of literary criticism, film studies, and cultural history, this text has the potential to reach both an academic audience and the broader readership that has long existed for these novels as well as the even broader one interested in reappraising the period of the global counterculture—among the most important of the influences that have shaped the contemporary world.