Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture

This highly original study opens up a new dimension to Joseph Conrad by revealing his lifelong fascination with the popular culture of his day. Drawing on original archival materials and treating subjects as diverse as Bovril advertising, spirit photography, sea shanties, global tourism, and the new sport of speed-walking, it shows how Conrad's fiction makes a sustained response to early-twentieth-century popular culture and will be of interest to all students, scholars and enthusiasts of Conrad.

'Donovan is to be praised both for the care and detail of his excavation of popular culture in Conrad's oeuvre and for the lucidity with which he presents his results...Not only does this volume provoke renewed interest in its subject matter, but it also stands as a paradigm in its meticulous research, so that the combination provides that novel and most welcome thing - a riveting new work of Conrad scholarship.' - The Conradian

'What strikes the reader in this volume is Donovan's appreciation of Conrad's life and works, and his ability to bind together Conrad's innumerable subtle reflections on the emerging dominance of popular culture. This work is one of the most readable and informative studies of Conrad to appear in many years, an example of what rigorous scholarship and fine writing can achieve.' - English Literature in Transition

'Donovan's rewarding new study .... successfully demonstrates how thoroughly Conrad's fiction is permeated by the material traces of popular culture. ... Each of its extended readings and biographical anecdotes serves both to consolidate and to invite reconsideration of the new face of Conrad that has emerged in Victorian and modernist studies over the past few decades. The aura of this new face deserves many more such studies.'- Victorian Studies

Auteur

STEPHEN DONOVAN is a postdoctoral researcher at Uppsala University, Sweden. He has previously been a visiting lecturer at Royal Holloway College, London, and the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Contenu
Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction Visual Entertainment Tourism Advertising Magazine Fiction Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index