Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph ConradAwarded third place for The Adam Gillon Book Award in Conrad Studies 2009 The book presents a sustained critique of the interlinked (and contradictory) views that the fiction of Joseph Conrad is largely innocent of any interest in or concern with sexuality and the erotic, and that when Conrad does attempt to depict sexual desire or erotic excitement then this results in bad writing. Jeremy Hawthorn argues for a revision of the view that Conrad lacks understanding of and interest in sexuality. He argues that the comprehensiveness of Conrad's vision does not exclude a concern with the sexual and the erotic, and that this concern is not with the sexual and the erotic as separate spheres of human life, but as elements dialectically related to those matters public and political that have always been recognized as central to Conrad's fictional achievement. The book will open Conrad's fiction to readings enriched by the insights of critics and theorists associated with Gender Studies and Post-colonialism. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 36
... elements integrated into a more comprehensive and more probing artistic vision , and this is also true of the way in which allusions to contraception work in The Secret Agent . In a carefully argued article , Thomas Jackson Rice claims ...
... elements in Conrad's fiction rather than on to details that are specific to individual texts . Thus for example Bernard C. Meyer claims that there is a ' basic and consistent formula underlying the biography of most of Conrad's invented ...
... element in Conrad , one that never really finds a home in his work and yet , in involuted forms , is never truly out of it ... elements to light is to read Conrad's fiction much as Freud reads the dream – by searching for slips , double ...
... elements from Conrad's fiction and to examine them in isolation . Some such filtering out is unavoidable if my case ... element of sexual energy with public and political themes . On the contrary : I detect a deliberate recognition of ...
... elements in them that are often organically linked to those elements that have , for many years , been deemed worthy of serious study . In stressing the need to historicize our understanding of sexuality , Joseph Bristow points out that ...
Contents
1 | |
17 | |
2 The exotic and the erotic in An Outcast of the Islands and Heart of Darkness | 61 |
3 The erotics of cruelty in A Smile of Fortune The Planter of Malata The Secret Agent Victory and Freya of the Seven Isles ... | 77 |
4 Voyeurism in The ShadowLine and Under Western Eyes | 131 |
Conclusion and? | 153 |
Notes | 159 |
Bibliography | 166 |
Index | 173 |