Amar  Acheraiou. Joseph Conrad and the Reader: Questioning Modern Theories  of Narrative and Readership. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
 

"Joseph Conrad and the Reader is the first book fully devoted to  Conrad's relation to the reader, visual theory and authorship. This  study proposes new approaches to modern literary criticism  and examines the limits of deconstructionist theories,  introducing new theoretical concepts of reading and  reception."

     Katherine Isobel Baxter and Richard J. Hand, eds.Joseph Conrad and the Performing Arts. Ashgate, 2009.

"Conrad's fiction is characterized by an  enduring recourse to the performing arts for metaphor, allegory, symbol, and  subject matter; however, this aspect of Conrad's non-dramatic works has only  recently begun to come into its own among literary critics. In response to  this seminal moment, Joseph Conrad and the Performing Arts offers an  interdisciplinary forum for one of the most interesting and nascent areas of  Conrad studies. Adopting a variety of theoretical approaches, the  contributors examine major and neglected works within the context of the  performing arts: cultural performance in Conrad's 'Malay' fiction; Conrad's  use and parody of popular traditions such as melodrama, 'Grand-Guignol,' and commedia dell'arte; Conrad's engagement with the visual culture of early  cinema; Conrad's interest in the motifs of shadowgraphy (shadow plays);  Conrad's relationship to Shakespeare; and the enduring influence of opera on  his work. Taken together, the essays look to provide, through solid  scholarship and richly provocative speculation, new insight into Conrad's  oeuvre, and invite future dialogue in the burgeoning field of Conrad and the  performing arts."

    Harold Bloom, ed. Heart of Darkness: Bloom's Guides. New York:  Bloom's Literary Criticism, 2009.

"Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' is not  simply a critique of colonialism in the Congo, but it is an examination of  the human tendency toward self-endangering corruptibility. This updated  collection of critical essays suggests that this resonant work has taken on  the power of myth. This study guide to 'Heart of Darkness' also features an  annotated bibliography and a listing of other works by the author."

    Fausto Ciompi, ed. One of Us: Studi inglesi e conradiani offerti a Mario Curreli. Edizioni ETS, 2009.

 

"A lengthy collection of essay on Conrad's life and  works, some in English and some in Italian, by such scholars as Robert  Hampson, Andrzej Busza, Jeremy Hawthorn, Laurence Davies, and Cedric  Watts."

     Michael John DiSanto. Under Conrad's Eyes: The  Novel as Criticism. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009.

"Joseph Conrad's novels are recognized as  great works of fiction, but they should also be counted as great works of  criticism. A voracious reader throughout his life, Conrad wrote novels that  question and transform the ideas he encountered in non-fiction, novels, and  scientific and philosophic works. Under Conrad's Eyes looks at  Conrad's revaluations of some of his important nineteenth-century  predecessors--Carlyle, Darwin, Dickens, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, and  Nietzsche. Detailed readings of works from 'Heart of Darkness' to Victory explore Conrad's language and style, focusing on questions regarding the  will to know and the avoidance of knowledge, the potential harmfulness of  sympathy, and the competing instincts for self-preservation and  self-destruction. Comparative analyses show how Conrad transforms aspects ofBleak House into The Secret Agent and Middlemarch intoNostromo. Also included are explorations of Conrad's ambivalence  towards Carlyle's faith in work and hero-worship as rejuvenators of English  culture and his views on Nietzsche's assault on Christianity. This important  new study of a novelist of profound contemporary relevance demonstrates how  Conrad exemplifies the artist as critic while challenging both the  categories we impose on texts and the boundaries we erect between literary  periods."

    Linda Dryden, Stephen Arata, and Eric Masse, eds. Robert Louis  Stevenson and Joseph Conrad: Writers of Transition. Texas Tech  University Press, 2009.

"This  book-length study specifically examines the many intersections in the works  of Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad and extends the focus of current  debate beyond the writers' South Seas literature. Considering Stevenson and  Conrad's shared literary history and experience of Victorian London, it  examines their convergence of styles in the emergent modernism of the fin de  siecle, their romance and adventure modes, their fictions of duality, and  their exploration of the human psyche. Moreover, the book attempts to  recuperate Stevenson's reputation as a serious writer, not only as Conrad's  antecedent and influence but as a writer equally worthy of study in these  shared modes."

    Wieslaw Krajka, ed. Joseph Conrad: Between Literary Techniques and  Their Messages. East European Monographs, 2009.
 

"Thirteen contributors from a variety of backgrounds tackle the use of  irony, contrast, narrative, themes of belonging, Englishness, imperialism,  portrayals of women, and conceptions of truth and evil as they were  expressed in the work of Joseph Conrad. Krajka expands Conrad  criticism to explore the modernist's mastery of literary technique and his  contribution to visions of humanity. Krajka's collection opens with two  essays that explore the identity of Conrad, his characters, and his  narrators, and then engages with the ideology, philosophy, and ethics of  Conrad's fiction, especially the balance he strikes between literary  technique and the meanings those techniques convey."

    John T. Nichol. Reader’s Guide to Joseph  Conrad. Centrum Press, 2009.

     Ludwig  Schauder. Free Will and Determinism in Joseph Conrad's Major Novels. Rodopi, 2009.

"This  interdisciplinary study seeks to consider the philosophical debate about  free will and determinism but also to consider the relevant historical,  economic, scientific, and literary discourses in the Victorian and  Early-Modernist periods. Against this background a paradigmatic analysis of  three of Conrad's most significant novels--Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent--investigates the writer's  position in the free will and determinism debate by identifying certain  recurring themes in which the freedom-of-the-will problem manifests itself.  It is hoped that light is thereby also thrown on a central Conradian  paradox: how Conrad can insist on morality and moral responsibility, which  presupposes the existence of free will, in a materialist-deterministic  world, which denies it."

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

 "Joseph Conrad's Polish background, his extensive travels and his  detached view of his adopted country, Britain, gave him a perspective  unique among English writers of the twentieth century. Combining  Continental and British influences, Victorian and Modernist styles, he was an artist acutely responsive to his age, whose  works reflect and chronicle its shaping forces. This volume examines the  biographical, historical, cultural and political contexts that fashioned his  works. Written by a specialist, each short chapter covers a specific theme  in relation to Conrad's life and work: letters, Modernism, the sea, the  Polish and French languages, the First World War, and many other topics.  This book is directed toward scholars as well as to those beginning their study  of this extraordinary writer. It seeks to show how this combination of different  contexts allowed Conrad to become a key transitional figure in the early  emergence of British literary modernism."

     Joanna Skolik. The Ideal of Fidelity in Conrad's Works. Adam Marszalek, 2009.

"For Polish general readers and scholars  alike, Conrad's evident respect for the words solidarity and fidelity has resonated long and loud, suggesting as they do that his  world, fiction and non-fiction alike, are imbued with values that are most  fully understood by those who have Polish history and culture in their  veins. Skolik shares this conviction, and, in spite of the extensive Polish  (and indeed international) commentary already in existence, argues for  something new to say about the concept of fidelity in general and its  significance to Conrad's writings in particular. Rather than take the  meaning of fidelity as self-evident, as it rather frequently has been in the  critical literature, she starts by setting a wider philosophical context,  drawing among other on Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Durkheim, and Russell for  a concentrated discussion of the moral values, and on Gabriel Marcel and  Josiah Royce for their contributions to understanding the specific virtue offidelity. This, so to speak, internationalisation of the subject  works toward the effect not of blurring the Polish aspects of the idea but  of offering a broader perceptive in which the national particularities shine  all the more clearly."