Migration, Modernity and Transnationalism in the Work of Joseph Conrad

Description

Examining the notion of migration and transnationalism within the life and work of Joseph Conrad, this book situates the multicultural and transnational characters that comprise his fiction while locating Conrad as a subject of the Russian state whose provenance is Polish, but whose identity is that of a merchant sailor and English country gentleman. Conrad’s characters are often marked by crossings – changes of nation, changes of culture, changes of identity – which refract Conrad’s own cultural transitions. These crossings not only subjectivise the experience of the migrant through the modern complexities of technology and speed, but also through cross-cultural encounters of food and language. Collectively, these essays explore the experience of the migrant as exile; the inescapable intermeshing of migration, modernity and transnationalism as well as Conrad’s own global and multicultural outlook. Conrad’s work writes across historical, political and ethnic borders speaking to a transnational reality that continues to have relevance today. Cover Contents List of figures Notes on contributors Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction Kim Salmons and Tania Zulli Part One Crossing borders 1 Conrad’s rites of entry and return Robert Hampson 2 Back in (the) Ukraine: Rites of passage and rites of entry William Atkinson 3 From Berdyczów to Bishopsbourne: Conrad’s real and imaginary journeys Agnieszka Adamowicz-Pośpiech 4 ‘The vision of a cosmopolitan’: The transnational aesthetic of A Personal Record Riccardo Capoferro Part Two Empire, movement and migration 5 ‘New shades of expression’: Death and Empire in Conrad’s unrestful tales Richard Niland 6 ‘Queer foreign fish’: Food and migration in Almayer’s Folly and The Secret Agent Kim Salmons 7 ‘The east spoke to me, but it was in a western voice’: Perlocutionary acts and the language of migration in Conrad’s fiction Tania Zulli 8 A ‘settled resident’: Movements of peoples and cultures in Conrad’s Malay fiction Andrew Francis Part Three Modernity and the transnational 9 Arab and Muslim transnationalism in Conrad’s Malay fiction Katherine Isobel Baxter 10 ‘Amy Foster’, Amerika and After Bread: Modernism, technology and the immigrant Yael Levin 11 Four exiles in three volumes: W. G. Sebald, Ewa Kuryluk, Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Joseph Conrad Laurence Davies Afterword: How Black lives matter for Conrad’s personal record of migration and transnationalism Chris GoGwilt Index of Names Index of Subjects