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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... scenes too often slide into the melodramatic , and for modern readers few things are less erotic than melodrama . We can summarize another commonly held view of Conrad's fiction as follows . In it , moments of passion or sexual ...
... scene : Jim's meeting with Gentleman Brown , D'Hubert's with Feraud , Heyst's with his three infernal shades . ( 25 ) In spite of these thought - provoking parallels - and in spite of the fact that Wills has earlier claimed that the old ...
... scene , with the meeting between the narrator and the Count prompted by the latter's address to the former ' over the celebrated Resting Hermes which we had been looking at side by side ' would have been enough to awaken the suspicions ...
... scene calls to mind Conrad's emphasis on ' the celebrated Resting Hermes ' at the outset of the story . This sculptural allusion is intriguing ( literally Hermes means ' he of the stone heap ' ) since Hermes traditionally is associated ...
... scene when Jim fails to join the cutter launched in rough seas to rescue the two sailors ; it is only in retrospect that Jim thinks to himself : ' Not a particle of fear was left ' . During the scene itself , the imagination of the ...
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 |