Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance

by Michaela Bronstein Ford Madox Ford’s Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924) is an account of Ford’s collaboration and friendship with Joseph Conrad over the decades before the death of the latter. It is also a manifesto for Ford’s ideas on literary impressionism, and it attempts to mark out places where, according to Ford, he… Continue Reading Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance

Nostromo

by Kenneth Ligda “I’d rather have written Conrad’s Nostromo than any other novel”—F. Scott Fitzgerald.[1] “The greatest novel in English of this century”—Walter Allen.[2] “[O]ne of the finest of all English historical novels”—Terry Eagleton.[3] “It is, in my view, the masterwork of that ‘puissant rêveur,’ as Gustav[e] Kahn once called Conrad….one of the few mastering… Continue Reading Nostromo

The Black Mate

by Jack Skeffington “The Black Mate” possesses—possibly—the distinction of being Joseph Conrad’s first piece of fiction. Unfortunately, only two dates are certain regarding this short story: first published in the April, 1908 edition of The London Magazine, “The Black Mate” escaped collection until the posthumous volume Tales of Hearsay in 1925. The title of that… Continue Reading The Black Mate

Chance

by Michaela Bronstein Joseph Conrad’s Chance (1913) brought him public sales and success after years of relatively obscure work on the novels now considered his masterpieces. Conrad was working on Chance by 1905, but until May 1911 he worked slowly. The novel began serial publication in 1912. In 1914 the book form (published September 1913) outsold… Continue Reading Chance

The Secret Agent

by Pericles Lewis Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) explicitly thematizes the transformation of time that Conrad and other modernist novelists explore by departing from strict chronology, making extensive use of flashbacks and foreshadowing, and demonstrating the disjuncture between private and public time. The novel imagines an anarchist plot to blow up Greenwich Observatory, where… Continue Reading The Secret Agent

Heart of Darkness

by Pericles Lewis Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) is an early and important example of modernist experimentation in English fiction. In the voice of his frame narrator, Conrad provides a crucial image for understanding the symbolism of modern literature when he explains that the stories of Marlow, the narrator of most of the novella,… Continue Reading Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad

Biography by Anthony Domestico Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), a Polish expatriate born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, worked as a sailor on French and British ships before becoming a naturalized British subject in 1886. He developed an elaborate, beautiful English prose style and probed many of the deep questions of modern fiction in his short stories and novels.  His work was… Continue Reading Joseph Conrad