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
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... passion in his work and his younger , literary friends , giving , respectively , to his wife and young Boris [ sic ] the interest more appropriately given to a faithful servant , or a frisky puppy ' ( 60 ) . Well , I have to say that ...
... passion or sexual excitement are rare , and are often presented in such a way as to minimize or remove any evocation of the erotic in the reader . Sometimes they are combined with conventionalized or clichéd depictions of the ' exotic ...
... passionate and the erotic . This is a view that defines politics in a manner reminiscent of a pre - feminist , pre- sexual politics era in which ' politics ' excludes the private , the emotional , and to a large extent too the female ...
... passion and lust , sadism and masochism , homosexuality , prostitution and contraception . In his short fiction ' Falk ' explicit parallels are repeatedly drawn between the need for food and the need to mate . ' He [ Falk ] was hungry ...
... passion was , and what it felt like to the man or woman in its grip , although Conrad the man seems to have been unwilling to talk about this . Jósef Retinger , in his 1941 memoir Conrad and his Contemporaries , reports that ' Once I ...
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 |