Taner Can. (De)forming the Modernist Canon: Joseph Conrad and English Literary Modernism. Wisa, 2014.

"Can explores the prevailing problems  of literary periodization and canon formation in the history of English  literary modernism. In his survey of the development of modernist  literary studies, he looks to demonstrate that the current conception fo English literary modernism and its established historical accounts are  largely dominated by the exlusionary aesthetic perspective and  restrictive critical assumptions that the early modernist writers  deployed to define their art. Can seeks to redress this negative and  marginalizing historiography of modernism through a reassessment of  Joseph Conrad’s literary career and achievements."

William Freedman. Joseph Conrad and the Anxiety of Knowledge. University of South Carolina Press, 2014.

"Few if any writers in the English language have  been cited, praised, chided, or marveled at more routinely than Joseph  Conrad for the perplexing evasiveness, contradictoriness, and  indeterminacy of their fiction. William Freedman argues that the  explanations typically offered for these identifying characteristics of  much of Conrad's work are inadequate if not mistaken. Freedman's claim  is that the illusiveness of a coherent interpretation of Conrad's novels and shorter fictions is owed not primarily to the inherent slipperiness or inadequacy of language or the consequence of a willful  self-deconstruction. Nor is it a product of the writer's philosophical  nihilism or a realized aesthetic of suggestive vagueness. Rather,  Freedman argues, the perplexing elusiveness of Conrad's fiction is the  consequence of a pervasive ambivalence toward threatening knowledge, a  protective reluctance and recoil that are not only inscribed in Conrad's tales and novels, but repeatedly declared, defended, and explained in  his letters and essays. Conrad's narrators and protagonists often set  out on an apparent quest for hidden knowledge or are drawn into one. But repelled or intimidated by the looming consequences of their own  curiosity and fervor, they protectively obscure what they have barely  glimpsed or else retreat to an armory of practiced distractions. The  result is a confusingly choreographed dance of approach and withdrawal,  fascination and revulsion, revelation and concealment. The riddling  contradictions of these fictions are thus in large measure the result of this ambivalence, their evasiveness the mark of intimidation's triumph  over fascination. The idea of dangerous and forbidden knowledge is at  least as old as Genesis, and Freedman provides a background for Conrad's recoil from full exposure in the rich admonitory history of such  knowledge in theology, myth, philosophy, and literature. He traces  Conrad's impassioned, at times pleading case for protective avoidance in the writer's letters, essays, and prefaces, and he considers its  enactment and its connection to Conrad's signature evasiveness in a  number of short stories and novels, with special attention to The Secret Agent, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Under Western Eyes, and The Rescue."

Omar Sabbagh. From Sight Through to In-sight: Time, Narrative and Subjectivity in Conrad and Ford. Rodopi, 2014.

"An interdisciplinary study of the  Impressionist/early Modernist works of Conrad and Ford, this book aims  to show how the represented temporalities (whether to do with past,  present, future experience within and without the novels, or  logical/structural relations of 'before' and 'after') are at the core of the won effects of both authors' oeuvres. Looking at such well-known  works as Nostromo, The Good Soldier, The Fifth Queen, Parade's End, the study makes use of philosophy (historical and contemporary),  theology, psychoanalysis, and other sources, to re-describe, unlock and  display the fertile ways in which time and historical experience are  both manumitted within the tales analysed, and, recursively, within  their reading experience. Ultimately, the two senses of 'making you  see', from Conrad's iconic Preface, are used as gambits to understand  the ways in which these novels are metaphysically vibrant, symbolically  hopeful--as against the more common interpretation of metaphysical  dissolution and (over-determined) failure."