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Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper

Online ISBN:
9780191671081
Print ISBN:
9780198117858
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper

Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan
Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan

Senior Lecturer, English Department

Haifa University
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Published online:
3 October 2011
Published in print:
15 August 1991
Online ISBN:
9780191671081
Print ISBN:
9780198117858
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

A study which relates Conrad’s work to the crisis of modernity in the late 19th century, this book discusses ‘faultlines’ — ambiguities and apparent aesthetic ruptures — in nine of the major novels and novellas. These faultlines are diagnosed as the symptoms of an unresolved tension between Conrad’s temperamental affinity with the Nietzschean outlook and his fierce ideological rejection of its ultimate implications. Presenting Conrad as ‘a modernist at war with modernity’, the book studies the perpetual tug-of-war between the artistic will to meaning and the writer’s susceptibility to the modern temper, both as a theme and as a structuring principle in his work. The modes of this struggle are defined as the ‘failure of myth’, the ‘failure of metaphysics’, and the ‘failure of textuality’. The inquiry draws on the work of Nietzsche, Vaihinger, Bakhtin, Heller, and MacIntyre, amongst others, to present the ethical and epistemological issues which are interwoven with Conrad’s aesthetics.

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