Conrad, Language, and Narrative PDF

In this re-evaluation of the writings of Joseph Conrad, Michael Greaney places language and narrative at the heart of his literary achievement.

A trilingual Polish expatriate, Conrad brought a formidable linguistic self-consciousness to the English novel; tensions between speech and writing are the defining obsessions of his career.

He sought very early on to develop a 'writing of the voice' based on oral or communal modes of storytelling.

Greaney argues that the 'yarns' of his nautical raconteur Marlow are the most challenging expression of this voice-centred aesthetic.

But Conrad's suspicion that words are fundamentally untrustworthy is present in everything he wrote.

The political novels of his middle period represent a breakthrough from traditional storytelling into the writerly aesthetic of high modernism.

Greaney offers an examination of a wide range of Conrad's work which combines recent critical approaches to language in post-structuralism with an impressive command of linguistic theory.