Amar Acheraiou, ed. Joseph Conrad and the Orient. East European Monographs, 2012.
"Joseph Conrad and the Orient explores Conrad's perception and construction of the Orient in his Malay fiction. While it entertains a sustained dialogue with past and recent studies of Conrad's handling of colonial cross-cultural encounters, imperial ideology and race politics, this collection of original essays continues the debates on these key issues. The authors adopt a variety of critical and methodological perspectives--socio-political, anthropological, philosophical, postcolonial, poststructuralist, historical, and linguistic--in order to investigate the richness, complexity and multi-dimensional character of Conrad's work. Overall, these approaches seek to enlighten Conrad's deep engagement with the East, not only as a crucial source of fictional material, but also as a polyphonic discursive space, a cultural and racial Other, an ideological construct, and a site of Western struggle for global commercial hegemony and native anti-colonial resistance."
Brian Artese. Testimony on Trial: Conrad, James, and the Contest for Modernism. University of Toronto Press, 2012.
"Who is a more authoritative source of information--the person who experiences it firsthand, or a more 'impartial' authority? In the late nineteenth century, testimony became a common feature of literary works both fact and fiction. But with the rise of new journalism, the power of testimony could be undermined by anonymous, institutional voices--a Victorian subversion which continues to this day. Testimony on Trial examines the conflicts over testimony through the eyes of two of its major combatants, Joseph Conrad and Henry James. Brian Artese finds a direct inspiration for "Heart of Darkness" in the anti-testimonial scheming of Henry Morton Stanley and the New York Herald. Through readings of works including Lord Jim and The Portrait of a Lady, Artese seeks to demonstrate how the cultural conditions that worked against testimony fed into a nascent conflict about the meaning of modernism itself."
Robert Hampson. Conrad’s Secrets. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
"Conrad’s Secrets explores various secrets relevant to Conrad’s fiction--trade secrets, sexual secrets, urban secrets, medical secrets and naval secrets. It seeks to recovers lost or less familiar areas of knowledge as necessary contexts for that fiction--Malay trade, Victorian anarchism, policing in Victorian London, financial and sexual scandals, for example--and attempts to show how these form part of the texture of Conrad’s work. Conrad’s Secrets advocates and enacts an historical formalist approach that, among other things, looks to show how Conrad’s Malay tales are differentiated from adventure romance; that seeks to throw a new light on Conrad’s use of Marlow as narrator; that attempts to provide a thickly contextualized reading of The Secret Agent; and tries to recover a neglected aspect of Conrad’s writing career--as a writer of World War I fiction."
Nidesh Lawtoo, ed. Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' and Contemporary Thought Revisiting the Horror with Lacoue-Labarthe. Continuum, 2012.
"With its innovative narrative structure and its controversial explorations of race, gender and empire, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a landmark of 20th century literature. This book brings together leading scholars to explore the full range of contemporary philosophical and critical responses to the text. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Contemporary Thought includes the first publication in English of philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s essay, 'The Horror of the West', described by J. Hillis Miller as 'a major essay on Conrad’s novel. One of the best ever written.' In the company of Lacoue-Labarthe, leading scholars explore new readings of Conrad’s text from a multiplicity of theoretical perspectives, including deconstructive, psychoanalytic and postcolonial approaches"
Allan H. Simmons, et al., eds. Joseph Conrad: Contemporary Reviews. 4 vols. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
“Joseph Conrad: Contemporary Reviews looks to fill a significant void in Conrad scholarship. A resource both to Conrad specialists and to students of literary Modernism, this four-volume collection seeks to provide as complete as possible a view of the contemporary reception of the writer's works in the English-speaking world. The reviews cover all of Conrad's writings from Almayer's Folly (1895) to the posthumously published Last Essays (1926). The volumes also take into their purview the collaborations with Ford Madox Ford. Found here are evaluations by journalists as well as by creative writers, the latter including H. G. Wells, Katherine Mansfield, Walter de la Mare and Virginia Woolf. The volumes offer insights into early twentieth-century reviewing practices, the marketing of 'literary' fiction and the wide interest in such writing, as reviews of Conrad's work regularly appeared in provincial and colonial newspapers.”
