Routledge Joseph Conrad: Critical Assessments (Critical Assessments of Writers in English S)

In September 1903, Joseph Conrad wrote to H.G. Wells that a writer should go forth...casting a wide and generous net where there would be room for everybody, where indeed every sort of fish would be welcome, appreciated and made use of. This collection attempts to cast just such a net over Conrad's extraordinary life as well over the sheer scale and variety of both his work and the responses to it. In contrast to other great English writers, Conrad experienced several lives: he spent his youth in Poland and Russia, his adolescence in France, his adult life as a mariner in the British Merchant Service; then, from the age of 37, following the publication in 1895 of Almayer's Folly , he spent the rest of his life in England as a writer. Between June 1896 when he began The Nigger of the Narcissus through the completion of the holograph of Under Western Eyes in January 1910, Conrad experienced a burst of sustained creative energy (equalled only to Dickens in English literature) during which he also produced such masterpieces as Heart of Darkness, Typhoon, Amy Foster, Lord Jim, Nostromo , and The Secret Agent . Included in this collection are responses to, and estimations of, Conrad's life and works; memories and impressions of the man and artist; reviews of all his output; articles on all his novels, novellas and short stories, on his autobiographies, plays, essays, sketches and letters; on his relationship to his Polish and French heritages and to Russian and American writers; on his relationship to his contemporaries and to Nineteenth Century European thought: and lastly, a section of 53 essays covering most aspects of his work.