Joseph Conrad And Popular Culture

by Donovan, Stephen

• ISBN13: 9781403908100
• ISBN10: 1403908109
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-12-10
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture offers a provocative alternative to the view of Joseph Conrad as far removed from the world of Victorian and Edwardian popular culture. From a prototype video arcade in wartime Vienna to the tourist hordes of Capri to the driving seat of a speeding Cadillac in Kent, it shows how Conrad's exposure to the experiences and artefacts of modern popular culture exercised a formative influence on his fiction. Through detailed readings of The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', Typhoon, The Secret Agent, Lord Jim and Chance, it recovers the full significance of panoramas, moving pictures, magic lantern effects, waxwork tableaux, Thomas Cook's globetrotters, and the new sport of hiking for some of Conrad's best-known works. Drawing on previously unpublished images and archival materials as diverse as Bovril advertisements and spirit photographs, this groundbreaking study reveals popular culture as a key historical context for this major Modernist writer and will be of interest to all students, scholars and enthusiasts of Conrad. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Stephen Donovan is a postdoctoral researcher at Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona Sweden. He has previously been a visiting lecturer at Royal Holloway College, London, and the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Table of Contents

List of Plates and Figures	p. viii
Acknowledgements	p. x
Abbreviations	p. xii
Introduction	p. 1
Visual Entertainment	p. 15
Tourism	p. 63
Advertising	p. 112
Magazine Fiction	p. 161
Conclusion	p. 191
Notes	p. 198
Works Cited	p. 211
Index	p. 225
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