Conrad's Politics; Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad

Download or read book Conrad's Politics; Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad written by Avrom Fleishman and published by Baltimore : Johns Hopkins Press. This book was released on 1967 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A full accounting of Conrad's political views makes it difficult to categorize him in any of the readily available rubrics, and the political implications of his faction are sufficiently subtle to leave any interpretation of them as doctrinal statements adrift in the wake of his art. The present study maintains that the novels must be read as dramatic expressions of a complex political imagination, and are therefore not reducible to political ideology. It attempts to show, moreover, that Conrad was open to the prevailing political ideas of his time, whose which it inherited from a century-old debate on the bases of social philosophy, and that the fiction which derived from his speculations was more complicated than received opinion would have it--indeed, was much the better art because of its rich intellectual tradition.