Conrad, Language, and Narrative

by Michael Greaney

• ISBN13: 9780521807548
• ISBN10: 0521807549
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-12-10
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In this re-evaluation of the writings of Joseph Conrad, Michael Greaney places language and narrative at the heart of his literary achievement. A trilingual Polish expatriate, Conrad brought a formidable linguistic self-consciousness to the English novel; tensions between speech and writing are the defining obsessions of his career. He sought very early on to develop a 'writing of the voice' based on oral or communal modes of storytelling. Greaney argues that the 'yarns' of his nautical raconteur Marlow are the most challenging expression of this voice-centred aesthetic. But Conrad's suspicion that words are fundamentally untrustworthy is present in everything he wrote. The political novels of his middle period represent a breakthrough from traditional storytelling into the writerly aesthetic of high modernism. Greaney offers an examination of a wide range of Conrad's work which combines recent critical approaches to language in post-structuralism with an impressive command of linguistic theory.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I. Speech communities: 1. 'The realm of living speech': Conrad and oral community

2. 'Murder by language': 'Falk' and Victory

3. 'Drawing-room voices': language and space in The Arrow of Gold

Part II. Marlow: 4. Modernist storytelling

'Youth' and 'Heart of Darkness'

5. The scandals of Lord Jim

6. The gender of Chance

Part III. Political communities: 7. Nostromo and anecdotal history

8. Linguistic dystopia: The Secret Agent

9. 'Gossip, tales, suspicions': Language and paranoia in Under Western Eyes

Conclusion.