3 Review(s)

Leading Conradian scholar Daniel Schwarz assembles his work from over the past two decades into one crucial volume, providing a long overdue look at an author who is finding renewed prominence in the twenty-first century. Schwarz touches on virtually all of Joseph Conrad's work including his masterworks and the later, neglected fiction. In his introduction, Schwarz explores how the study of Conrad has changed and why Conrad is such a focus of interest in terms of gender and postcolonial and cultural studies. He also demonstrates how Conrad fits into the reader's understanding of the modernist tradition. These central themes are carried into the essays that follow. Exploring such popular works as Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and ""The Secret Sharer,"" Schwarz addresses issues raised by recent theory, discussing the ways in which contemporary readers, indeed even himself, have come to read Conrad differently. He does so, however, while still employing essential Conradian themes such as the disjunction between interior and articulated motives and the discrepancies between dimly acknowledged needs, obsessions, and compulsions and actual behavior. Schwarz also touches on the extent to which Conrad's conservative desires for a few simple moral and political ideas were often at odds with his remarked skepticism. While not ignoring the ways in which Conrad falls short in terms of contemporary values, Schwarz nonetheless stresses that from their opening paragraphs Conrad's works establish a grammer of psychological, political, and moral cause and effect. Rereading Conrad sheds new light on an author who has spoken to readers for over a century. Schwarz's essays take account of recent developments in theory and cultural studies, including postcolonial, feminist, gay, and ecological perspectives, and show how reading Conrad has changed in the face of the theoretical explosion that has occurred over the past two decades. Scholars, teachers, and students will find value in this stimulating work from an author who has taught and studied Conrad for over thirty-five years.