Conrad's Models of Mind was first published in 1971. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In a new approach to understanding the psychological assumptions that lie behind the creation of a work of fiction, Professor Johnson analyzes a number of Joseph Conrad's novels and short stories, identifying and explaining Conrad's changing conceptions or models of mind. As he points out in his introduction: "Every writer makes assumptions about the nature of the mind, whether they may be elaborate theories, metaphors that seem simple but imply a great deal, downright beliefs, or vague gestalten. And such assumptions color his whole creation, the way his characters think and feel and react, possibly even his choice of subject matter." The author traces Conrad's steady progression away from deductive psychology, involving such entities as will, passion, ego, or sympathy, toward a flexible, and, for the period, new psychology that had implications for his entire development as a writer. Professor Johnson finds certain affinities between Conrad's models of mind and those of a number of other writers, among them, Schopenhauer, Sartre, and Pascal. He shows that one aspect of Conrad's psychology was closely allied to the Schopenhauerian concept of will but that when he wrote Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo Conrad moved toward an existential concept of self-image and self-creation similar to Sartre's psychology in Being and Nothingness. Finally, Professor Johnson examines Conrad's novel The Rescue and shows how hopeless it was for Conrad to return to earlier conceptions of mind after he had explored the new existential models.

This book provides a comprehensive, up-to-date history of the commentary written about the life and works of Joseph Conrad.

This book presents a new interpretation of Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim based on readings from not only its published text but also its principal manuscript text. Extensive use of the manuscript text has not been a feature of any other work on Lord Jim, and such use helps bring into focus a fixed pattern of meaning and an implicit unity that Conrad said the novel has. This result controverts not only postmodern critics, who say that the novel lacks any fixed pattern of meaning, but almost all critics since its publication, who have said that it lacks unity—specifically, that it separates into two halves, the Patna half and the Patusan half. However, with the help of the manuscript text, a detailed interpretation extending over the whole of Lord Jim shows it to be a unified whole. As Conrad wrote to his publisher four days after completing the novel, it is “the development of one situation, only one really from beginning to end.” Most recent Lord Jim criticism discusses the novel from a standpoint critical of the author and in political or epistemological terms, whereas the present book discusses it from a standpoint sympathetic to the author and in symbolic and metaphysical terms. The metaphysical question that pervades the novel and helps unify it is whether the “destructive element” that is the “spirit” of the Universe has intention—and, beyond that, malevolent intention—toward any particular individual or is, instead, indiscriminate, impartial, and indifferent. Depending (as a corollary) on the answer to that question is the degree to which the particular individual can be judged responsible for what he does or does not do. Variant responses to the question or its corollary are provided not only by several characters and voices in Lord Jim but also by a letter of Conrad’s and by excerpts from works by Arthur Schopenhauer, Thomas Hardy, James Thomson (“B. V.”), and John Stuart Mill. The present book is written in a lay vocabulary free of the diction of postmodern theory and so would be understandable to non-academic as well as academic readers. It is intended for anyone interested in gaining a coherent nonpolitical understanding of Lord Jim.

Werner Senn’s Conrad’s Narrative Voice draws on the methodology of linguistic stylistics and the analysis of narrative discourse to discuss Joseph Conrad’s perception of the role and the limitations of language. Tracing recurrent linguistic patterns allows Senn to demonstrate that Conrad’s view of the radical indeterminacy of the world is conveyed on the most basic levels of the author’s (often criticised) verbal style but permeates his work at all levels of the narrative. Detailed stylistic analysis also reveals the importance, to Conrad, of the spoken word, of oral communication. Senn argues that the narrators’ compulsive efforts to make their readers see and understand reflect Conrad’s ethics of human solidarity in a world he depicts as hostile, enigmatic and often senseless.

Owen Knowles, Research Fellow at the University of Hull. --Book Jacket.

Joseph Conrad is one of the great figures in the tradition of the novel. This clear and well-written study provides a critically-informed introduction to Conrad and his work, placing him in his political, social and literary context, and examining his relationship to Modernism, England and Empire. Organised thematically - broaching the leading themes of race, the sea and nationalism - Allan H. Simmons covers the range of Conrad's fiction, from the early Malay novels, through such key works as Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, to his later novels. First-time readers of Conrad are provided with in-depth contexts for appreciating a writer whose work is often challenging, while readers already familiar with Conrad's fiction will find new perspectives with which to view it. Approachable and authoritative, this introductory guide is essential for anyone with an interest in a master of twentieth-century fiction whose work variously altered the English and European literary landscape.

Otto Bohlmann's fascinating study offers detailed and exhaustive evidence that the major philosophical aspects of Conrad's novels exhibit a powerful existential strain, foreshadowing many central concerns of twentieth-century modernism. Through both wide and close reading, Dr Bohlmann illuminates more thoroughly than any previous scholar the remarkable extent to which Conrad's fiction is replete with ideas, attitudes and even phrases reminiscent of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Marcel, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus.

The popular yet complex work of Joseph Conrad has attracted much critical attention over the years, from the perspectives of postcolonial, modernist, cultural and gender studies. This guide to his compelling work presents: an accessible introduction to the contexts and many interpretations of Conrad’s texts, from publication to the present an introduction to key critical texts and perspectives on Conrad’s life and work, situated in a broader critical history cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism suggestions for further reading. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Joseph Conrad and seeking not only a guide to his works, but also a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds them.