Joseph Conrad and the Orient (Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives)

Joseph Conrad and the Orient is the first major study that deeply explores Conrad's perception and construction of the Orient in his Malay fiction. While it entertains a sustained dialogue with past and recent studies of Conrad's handling of colonial cross-cultural encounters, imperial ideology and race politics, this collection of original essays extends the debates on these key issues. The authors adopt a variety of critical and methodological perspectives - socio-political, anthropological, philosophical, postcolonial, poststructuralist, historical, and linguistic - in order to illuminate the richness, complexity and multi-dimensional character of Conrad's work. Overall, these compelling approaches enlighten Conrad's deep engagement with the East, not only as a crucial source of fictional material, but also as a polyphonic discursive space, a cultural and racial Other, an ideological construct, and a site of Western struggle for global commercial hegemony and native anti-colonial resistance.