This book reads the highly descriptive impressionist writings of Hardy and Conrad together in the light of a shared attention to sight and sound.

This volume explores 'scenic realism' in the major novels of Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad. It offers the first book-length study of connections between these two major authors bringing new approaches to bear on often-taught works, providing an understanding of impressionist styles of writing that is drawn from contemporary empirical science.

David Daisches, Douglas Bush, Robert B. Heilman, Arthur Mizener, and William Van P?Connor are among the contributors to this volume of essays on the nineteenth-century British novel. Each of the selections has been written expressly for this book and is p.

Conrad and Nature is the first collection of critical essays examining nature and the environment in Joseph Conrad’s writings. Together, these essays by established and emerging scholars reveal both the crucial importance of nature in Conrad’s work, and the vital, ongoing relevance of Conrad’s treatment of the environment in our era of globalization and climate change. No richer subject matter for an environmentally-engaged criticism can be found than the Conradian contexts and themes under investigation in this volume: island cultures, colonial occupations, storms at sea, mining and extraction, inconstant weather, ecological collapse, and human communities competing for resources. The 17 essays collected here —13 new essays, and 4 excerpts from classic works of Conradian scholarship -- consolidate some of the most important voices and perspectives on Conrad’s relation to the natural world, and open new avenues for Conradian and environmental scholarship in the 21st century.

Widely recommended, this guide to Conrad offers a vivid and incisive account of his life and literary career, and gives detailed attention to the contexts, themes, problems and paradoxes of his works.

In Shadowtime Jim Reilly explores how the great Victorian and Edwardian works of literature can be read in the light of current radical historiography, which foresees the extinction not just of art but of history itself. This is an outstanding combination of original readings and critical survey. Shadowtime is ideal material for anyone studying nineteenth-century realism, modernism and the history of aesthetics.

Ursula Lord explores the manifestations in narrative structure of epistemological relativism, textual reflexivity, and political inquiry, specifically Conrad's critique of colonialism and imperialism and his concern for the relationship between self and society. The tension between solitude and solidarity manifests itself as a soul divided against itself; an individual torn between engagement and detachment, idealism and cynicism; a dramatized narrator who himself embodies the contradictions between radical individualism and social cohesion; a society that professes the ideal of shared responsibility while isolating the individual guilty of betraying the illusion of cultural or professional solidarity. Conrad's complexity and ambiguity, his conflicting allegiances to the ideal of solidarity versus the terrible insight of unremitting solitude, his grappling with the dilemma of private versus shared meaning, are intrinsic to his political and philosophical thought. The metanarrative focus of Conrad's texts intensifies rather than diminishes their philosophical and political concerns. Formal experimentation and epistemological exploration inevitably entail ethical and social implications. Lord relates these issues with intellectual rigour to the dialectic of individual liberty and collective responsibility that lies at the core of the modern moral and political debate.