Lexington Books
Pages: 166
Trim: 6 x 9
978-0-7391-7824-9 • Hardback • December 2014 • $121.00 • (£93.00)
978-1-4985-0500-0 • Paperback • November 2016 • $49.99 • (£38.00)
978-0-7391-7825-6 • eBook • December 2014 • $47.00 • (£36.00)
Richard Ruppel is a professor of English at Chapman University.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Conrad’s Radically Contingent Politics
Chapter 1: The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’(1897), Almayer’s Folly (1895), & An Outcast of the Islands (1896)
Chapter 2: Lord Jim (1900)
Chapter 3: Heart of Darkness (1899-1900)
Chapter 4: Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (1904)
Chapter 5: “An Anarchist” (1906), “The Informer” (1906), & The Secret Agent (1907)
Chapter 6: A Personal Record (1912) & Under Western Eyes (1911)
Chapter 7: Chance (1912)
Bibliography
About the Author
In A Political Genealogy of Joseph Conrad, Ruppel proposes a much-needed critical intervention into Conrad’s complicated and ambivalent engagement with political discourse and ideology, particularly in the major novels. Surveying the criticism surrounding Conradian politics, Ruppel finds that previous critics unjustly pigeonholed Conrad as a profoundly conservative, even reactionary, writer. Arguing vigorously against this time-honored truism, Ruppel contends that the émigré polyglot’s political ideas and leanings were 'radically contingent,' particularly in relation to the audience he envisioned for himself. In tightly structured arguments in successive chapters on the major works, Ruppel reveals Conrad as politically protean rather than staunchly conservative. Far from a hindrance or an impediment to his aesthetic designs, his political mutability allowed him to throw into question grand narratives that underlie and structure political relations. This necessary, useful volume offers a fresh and engaging approach to the writer’s complex novelistic expressions of the political. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
— Choice Reviews
Ruppel provides a substantial analysis that nicely weaves historical texts and figures with Conrad's fiction and nonfiction.... Ultimately, A Political Genealogy of Joseph Conrad offers an insightful overview of not only Conrad's works, but also the varying factors that influenced Conrad throughout his writing career, and it adeptly supplements interpretations of Conrad's shifting and ambiguous political temperaments.
— Joseph Conrad Today
A Political Genealogy of Joseph Conrad is direct, clearly written, and stylistically effective. . . .This is a work well worth reading and one with which Conrad scholars in particular will want to be familiar.
— English Literature In Translation