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Joseph Conrad is widely recognised as a writer of sea stories with predominantly masculine themes. This book argues that despite this established reputation, Conrad did not neglect women's themes in all his works. The evidence of his biography, correspondence, and fiction indicates a complex and intriguing relationship between Conrad, the women in his life, his female characters, and readers of his work. He began in the Malay fiction by producing prominent female figures whose position offered an important critique of imperialism, a role that women continued to fulfill in the political works of the middle years, such as Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes. He increasingly turned to the issue of gender, female identity, and in relation to romance, how women are invited to conform to its conventionalised gestures and plots.

Perhaps the reason Conrad's Heart of Darkness remains provocative for us is because we are still contained within its horizon. The chapter unlocks this question by considering Conrad in relation to issues of nationalism and the transnational, particularly in terms of his Polish upbringing and his decision to go to sea. It also considers him in relation to problems of narration, especially his need of a figure such as Marlow (‘no ordinary seaman’), in the light of Conrad's own massively troubling visit to the Congo. Other major Conrad texts are explored — Lord Jim, Nostromo — before the discussion returns to Heart of Darkness to consider its relation to Empire: a world without end or horizon, where the waterways of the earth both connect and divide. Conrad, who made the link between navigation and fiction emblematic, remains a haunting yet prescient figure for us today.

This chapter focuses on Conrad's major political novels, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes, examining Conrad's politics in the context of nineteenth century philosophies of nationalism and nationhood. It first outlines Conrad's dialogue with the thought of Rousseau and Herder and the importance of these philosophers' work in a Polish Romantic context. Conrad's essay ‘Autocracy and War’ has a prominent role in this chapter as it represents Conrad's most political piece of writing on European politics and history, and the essay outlines Conrad's position regarding Polish and Russian identity, something treated somewhat more subtly in Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes. In addition to European politics, this chapter uncovers a crucially important context for Nostromo in Argentine writer Domingo F. Sarmiento's Facundo (1845), a work that Conrad borrowed from to authentically recreate the complex world of Latin American politics in Nostromo.

This chapter examines the Idiom Neutral in relation to Joseph Conrad's work of fiction Nostromo. It suggests that this novel is a hybrid in which neutrality is the very peculiarity of idiom. The translator's gate also has a thematic significance rarely developed in Conrad's work. This is because the gate to the idiom of the fiction's setting is also the facade of the novel. This chapter contends that the novel's remarkable gateway is thus a membrane as well as a blockage for a whole set of linguistic, cultural, and political concerns.

Nostromo is anchored in historical forces that undermine the notion of human agency: whether it is the power of capitalism and revolution or the inevitability of family inheritance and psychodynamic repetition, the individual conducts a life that is always already scripted. The novel is action heavy; the twists and turns of the plot performatively mirror the historical or libidinal forces that draw the heroes into a predetermined future. Moments of deceleration and hesitation that punctuate the narrative nevertheless interrupt the rush of history with the suggestion of accident, the unforeseen, and the new. The chapter turns to stylistic and thematic articulations of suspension in order to think the possibility of recurrence with difference, of an escape from an inevitability that is not only historically but also generically determined.

This essay revises existing accounts of the Victorian novel by locating it within the coal-powered energy system that increasingly made it possible. Revisiting our most familiar accounts of mediation, we explore how coal energy might be visible in cultural productions unable or unwilling to engage this system, as a system, directly. Through readings of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Cranford, J. R. Seeley’s The Expansion of England, and Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, we argue that “coal form” can be glimpsed in texts that imagine the transgression of bounded systems of belonging, and in formal affinities across what otherwise seem discrete categories of genre and geography. Ultimately, this analysis suggests that coal has also infused, invisibly yet pervasively, some of our most enduring categories of criticism as well.

Conrad’s Nostromo is his largest, most complex novel. It has the widest cast of characters, all presented in detail. Its origins are complex and contradictory. Nostromo came partly from Conrad’s own experiences, partly from his reading about South America. Unlike many of Conrad’s novels, Nostromo begins with a panoramic view of the scene of the action. That scene, however, is presented as just what happens to be there, in a “material vision” of the sea, the seashore, the harbor, the little town, with the snow-covered mountains behind. Nostromo has a double theme. It is the story of a civil war that leads to the founding of a new nation, with the connivance of “material [as well as imperialist] interests” from the United States. It also tells the stories of a whole series of characters whose lives are intertwined, but whose fates are decided by secret obsessions that make them isolatoes.

Joseph Conrad famously declared a desire ‘above all, to make you see’, but he also repeatedly deploys abstract nouns—truth, beauty, the universe—to denote his representational ambitions. Discussing Conrad’s use of the idea of the real as an anchor for his fiction, this chapter works across literature and philosophy not by recourse to the model of a ‘lens’ or influence study, but instead examines the ways in which the particularly metaphysical dimension of the representational capacities and incapacities of language reveals the contradictions inherent in our desire to place the objects of our experience in a clear, vivid scheme. What demands do realities beyond our sensory experience make upon us for shape and conceptual clarity? In new readings of Nostromo and The Secret Agent, this chapter explores how Conrad’s use of metaphor and analogy fractures the metonymic chains through which realism moves between the known and the unknown.

This chapter argues that the historical novel was crucial to the formation of English modernism. Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, possibly the founding text in modernist historiography, self-consciously plays with the ambiguity of the term “history,” which can mean both historical referent (events, forces of the past, etc.) and historical narrative itself (“a history”). Despite the fictional nature of Costaguana, Nostromo is in many ways “historical” in its setting, but more crucially is preoccupied with history as a kind of narrative. The novel alludes to works of history within its own narrative, and while it often does so critically—suggesting the unreliable and fabricated nature of any work of history—Nostromo also insists that histories are a necessary aspect of the human condition.

Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo is the focus of this chapter. Hailed as its author’s most comprehensive effort at historic panorama, epic in scale, Nostromo also (if somewhat surreptitiously) engages the diminutive form of fairy tale. Combining epic with fairy tale provides the perplexing indeterminacy many readers detect, which is often attributed to Conrad’s literary impressionism. What he reveals, however, is that even the supposedly factual enterprise of history is subject to the vicissitudes commonly accorded “creative” (thus fictive) literary forms like epic, lyric, and fairy tale. History and myth emerge from Nostromo as helpless collaborators in the hybrid fabrications of modern fiction.