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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... rôle in his fiction . — The second of the three views that I mention at the start of this Introduction was stated in its clearest and most widely influential form by Thomas C. Moser in his 1957 study Joseph Conrad : Achievement and ...
... rôle in the development of its plot , whether this desire is overt and recognized by the person who experiences it , as for example with the triangle of Taminah , Nina and Dain Maroola in Almayer's Folly , Willems and Aïssa in An ...
... rôles played by sexual desire and erotic experience in his fictions cannot be isolated from other uses of power : political , economic and emotional . To ignore the sexual and the erotic in his fiction is not just to pass over an ...
... rôle played by a set of linked qualities in Conrad's fiction , including those of voyeurism , impotence , and masochism . This does not claim to be a comprehensive study of the erotic and sexual elements in Conrad's fiction . I have ...
... rôle and even the presence of the intradiegetic narrator . During the years of New Critical hegemony the innocent reading is developed in certain standard ways that stress the richness and complexity of the text without challenging its ...
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 |