Joseph Conrad, Prefaces, Fire and Ash publishers

Bringing together the prefaces that Conrad penned for his various novels and stories, complete with Edward Garnett’s original introductory essay for the 1937 edition and a new foreword by eminent Conrad scholar Dr Owen Knowles, this publication restores the lustre of a lost treasure of Conradiana.

Nidesh Lawtoo, Conrad's Shadow: Catastrophe, Mimesis, Theory. Michigan State University Press.

Western thought has often dismissed shadows as fictional, but what if fictions  reveal original truths? Drawing on an anti-Platonic tradition in  critical theory, Lawtoo adopts ethical, anthropological, and  philosophical lenses to offer new readings of Joseph Conrad’s novels and the postcolonial and cinematic works that respond to his oeuvre. He  argues that Conrad’s fascination with doubles urges readers to reflect  on the two sides of mimesis: one side is dark and pathological, and  involves the escalation of violence, contagious epidemics, and  catastrophic storms; the other side is luminous and therapeutic, and  promotes communal survival, postcolonial reconciliation, and plastic  adaptations to changing environments. Once joined, the two sides reveal  Conrad as an author whose Janus-faced fictions are powerfully relevant  to our contemporary world of global violence and environmental crisis.

David Mulry, Conrad Among the Anarchists: Nineteenth Century Anarchism and the Secret Agent, Palgrave Macmillan

The inception, composition, and 1907 publication of The Secret Agent, one of Joseph Conrad’s most highly regarded political novels and a core text of literary modernism. This book examines the development and  revisions of the novel through the stages of the holograph manuscript,  first as a short story, then as a serialized sensation fiction in Ridgway’s Militant Weekly for the American market, before it was extensively revised and  published in novel form. Presciently anticipating the climate of modern  terror, Conrad’s text responds to the failed Greenwich Bombing, the  first anarchist atrocity to occur on English soil. This book charts its  historical and cultural milieu via press and anarchist accounts of the  bombing, to place Conrad foremost among the dynamite fiction of  revolutionary anarchism and terrorism in the late nineteenth and early  twentieth centuries.