Joseph Conrad: Language and Transnationalism

This book offers an exploration of Joseph Conrad’s fiction from a transnational perspective, not only by focussing on his well-known biographical condition of émigré which certainly invites to an international approach, but mainly by considering the many practices of cultural negotiation which characterize his narrative. In order to show this multiplicity of literary and linguistic effects, some chapters introduce a comparative analysis of the author’s prose and the works of other writers, such as R. L. Stevenson, Walter Benjamin, and Nadine Gordimer. Conrad is a British writer whose Polish origins and solid European literary culture shaped both the content and the form of his works. Several languages are present in his narrative: English as the official language of novel writing, French and Polish as the languages that influenced the structure and word choice of his fiction, the colonial languages introduced in his African and Malay stories. This linguistic variety conveys a diversity of cultural viewpoints accounting for his status as a cosmopolitan writer.