Full Description
This book takes a postcritical perspective on Joseph Conrad's central texts, including Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, and Lord Jim. Whereas critique is a form of reading that prioritizes suspicion, unmasking, and demystifying, postcritique ascribes positive value to the knowledge, affect, ethics, and politics that emerge from literature. The essays in this collection recognize the dark elements in Conrad's fiction—deceit, vanity, avarice, lust, cynicism, and cruelty—yet they perceive hopefulness as well. Conrad's skepticism unveils the dark heart of politics, and his critical heritage can feed our fear that humanity is incapable of improving. This Conrad is a well-known figure, but there is another, neglected Conrad that this book aims to bring to light, one who delves into the politics of hope as well as the politics of fear.
Chapters 1 and 2 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction.- Part I: Finding Hope—Recuperative Reading, Reparative Reading.- Chapter 2: Quixotic Conrad: Betrayal, Conversion, and Flight, Jay Parker.- Chapter 3: "The new sun is rising": Conrad, Women, and Hope, Rachel Hollander.- Part II: Understanding the Politics of Fear.- Chapter 4: Doubling Down on the Politics of Fear, Opening Up the Politics of Hope, Joyce Wexler.- Chapter 5: Joseph Conrad's "Strange Air of Finality": Negative Affect and the Politics of Fear in "The Tale, Jarica Linn Watts.- Chapter 6: "Pulsating Wrongfully":Critique, Cliché, and The Secret Agent, James Brophy.- Part III: Ethics and Aesthetics.- Chapter 7: "Heart of Darkness" and the Memory of the Holocaust, Riccardo Capoferro.- Chapter 8: The Beating Heart of Sublime Empire: The Secret Agent as Sequel to "Heart of Darkness", Jana M. Giles.- Chapter 9: Cross-cultural Accord in the Malay Fiction: The Performative Politics of Conrad's Eastern World, Mark Deggan.- Chapter 10: "Some Knowledge of Yourself": "Heart of Darkness" in the Twenty-First Century Literature Classroom—An Ethical Approach, Anna Lindhé.
