Ellen Harrington, Conrad’s Sensational Heroines: Gender and Representation in the Late Fiction of Joseph Conrad, Palgrave Macmillan 2017.
This volume considers Joseph Conrad’s use of multiple genres, including allusions to sensation fiction, pornography, anthropology, and Darwinian science, to respond to Victorian representations of of gender in layered and contradictory representations of his own. In his stories and later novels, the familiar writer of sea stories centered on men moves to consider the plight of women and the challenges of renegotiating gender roles in the context of the early twentieth century.
From the publisher.
Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, London and Glasgow: William Collins, 2017.
In a compelling blend of history, biography, and travelogue, Maya Jasanoff follows Conrad’s routes and the stories of his four greatest works—The Secret Agent, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo. Genre-bending, intellectually thrilling, and deeply humane, The Dawn Watch embarks on a spell-binding expedition into the dark heart of Conrad’s world—and through it to our own.
From the publisher.
Kim Salmon, Food in the Novels of Joseph Conrad: Eating as Narrative, Palgrave Macmillan 2017.
This book is about the role of food in the works of Joseph Conrad, analysing the social, political and anthropological context of references to meals, eating, food production and cannibalism. It offers a new perspective on the works of Joseph Conrad and provides an accessible medium through which readers can engage with the complex theories and philosophical dilemmas that Conrad presents in his fiction. This is the only major study of food in Conrad’s works; it is unique in its interdisciplinary approach to food in that it engages with sociological, political, historical, personal and literary perspectives, thus providing a multi-dimensional approach to cultural, revolutionary, periodical and fictional representations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This in turn, allows an interrogation of modern anxieties, embedded in cultural norms and values that can be interpreted through the way that food is prepared and eaten.
From the Publisher.
Jean M. Szczypien, “Sailing Towards Poland”with Joseph Conrad, Peter Lang Publishing 2017.
“This book is a striking--and strikingly necessary--contribution to the rich and enormously consequential tradition of considering Conrad in light of the literature, culture, history, and politics of his native Poland. Expanding our sense of Conrad’s echoes and interactions with Polish literary history to degrees hitherto unappreciated, Jean M. Szczypien advances a suggestive case for an entire symbolic register through which Conrad’s fiction is in consistent dialogue with Polish literary precedent, and in the process challenges our understandings of a significant number of Conrad’s texts. Readers interested in Conrad’s Polish moorings will find themselves irresistibly engaged by this text--and readers not yet interested in such ’Polish’ questions will find themselves challenged and compelled to change their minds by the significance of the subject and the gravity, eloquence, and provocative elasticity of its treatment here. Definitely an important contribution to current global and internationalist interests in Conrad generally.”
Peter Lancelot Mallios, University of Maryland
