Conrad's popular fictions
Subtitle: secret histories and sensational novels
By: Andrew Glazzard, Independent scholar, UK
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2015
Place of publication: New York, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 227
ISBN-13: 9781137559166
Subjects: Views on popular literature; Criticism and interpretation; Themes, motives; Knowledge; Popular literature
Description: Conrad's Popular Fictions examines the influence on Joseph Conrad's fiction of some of the most popular genres of late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain, such as detective and espionage fiction, the terrorist novel, and swindlers - in over a hundred Victorain and Edwardian popular novels as well as in Conrad's works, it shows how Conrad experimented creatively with genres, deploying the themes and tropes of popular fiction to develop psychological and philosophical insights and achieve extraordinary aesthetic effects. By recovering forgotten contexts for Conrad's fictions, this book shows how Conrad's work as well as the period's popular fiction exploited topical, newsworthy events. It argues that Conrad was never simply a highbrow writer, but used genre in different works to find new audiences - which he sought simultaneously to challenge and satisfy. -- from back cover.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: the all-powerful masses and the limited coterie: Conrad and problems of popularity; title: "Armed with the defensive mandate of a menaced society": detectives, professionalism, and liberty in The secret agent; title: "An actor in desperate earnest": informers and secret agency; title: "The inciter behind": spymasters and the eastern logic of Russia; title: "The cowardly bomb-throwing brutes": the many types of Conrad's "terrorists"; title: "The perpetrator of the most heartless frauds": swindlers, the new economy, and the limits of narrative; title: Conclusion: cooking the books.