‘All Those Figures’: Joseph Conrad and the Maritimes

2018 ◽  
pp. 27-46
Author(s):  
Randall Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Narrative Forms ◽  
Secret Agent

Conrad’s struggles with his Board of Trade Examinations – including in 1884, when Greenwich was established as the benchmark of global temporality – have much to suggest about the astronomical knowledge, aptitude with chronometers, general navigational expertise and reliance on Greenwich-based world measurements demanded by his career at sea. Demands concerned later affected his career as a novelist, too: not in provoking explicit resentment of Greenwich and its orders, but in some more covert resistance to them though anachronic narrative forms. New narrative temporalities introduced in novels including Lord Jim, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent anticipated and were a key influence on the modernist writing which followed in the next decades of the C20th.

Conrad, Joseph (1857–1924)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Peters
Keyword(s):  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Chinua Achebe ◽  
Graham Greene ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Heart Of Darkness ◽  
British Novelists ◽  
African Writers ◽  
Post War ◽  
Secret Agent ◽  
First World

Joseph Conrad was one of the foremost British novelists of the modernist period. Many of the narrative innovations he developed appeared a decade or more before similar technical experimentation became the norm among modernist writers. Furthermore, his radical skepticism was a stark contrast to the Edwardian optimism evident in the years prior to the First World War and anticipates the disillusionment so many modernist writers felt during the post-war era. Best known for ‘Heart of Darkness’, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, ‘The Secret Sharer’, and Under Western Eyes, Conrad influenced numerous writers who followed him, such as William Faulkner, Graham Greene, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and an entire generation of African writers who often found themselves in dialogue with Conrad {-} for example, Chinua Achebe and J. M. Coetzee.

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

Conradiana ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 254-255
Author(s):  
Ellen Burton Harrington
Keyword(s):  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Secret Agent

scholarly journals CONRAD AND THE COMIC TURN

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Kerr
Keyword(s):  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
Financial Centre ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
East End ◽  
City Of London ◽  
Secret Agent ◽  
The City

Of his nineteen years as a sailor, from 1874 to 1894, Joseph Conrad actually worked on ships for ten years and eight months, of which just over eight years were spent at sea, including nine months as a passenger (Najder 161–62). During these nomadic years, London was the place to which he returned again and again to seek his next berth, staying in a series of sailors’ homes, lodgings, and boarding houses. How did he spend his time, a single man with no family and few friends, whose main occupation was waiting? He recalled, in the preface toThe Secret Agent, “solitary and nocturnal walks all over London in my early days” (7). Ford Madox Ford says that Conrad knew all the bars around Fenchurch Street (which links the financial centre of the City of London to Whitechapel and the East End) from his days of waiting for a ship. Returning to the area later in life, according to Ford's slightly improbable memory, he “became at once the city-man gentleman-adventurer with an eye for a skirt,” who “could tell you where every husky earringed fellow with a blue, white-spotted handkerchief under his arm was going to. . . .” (Joseph Conrad116, 117). The reality of these London sojourns was probably less romantic, most of the time. But there was one place where a sailor ashore, without much money, could always go for company and entertainment: the music-hall.

scholarly journals Terrorism as reflected in Joseph Conrad’s the secret agent: A sociological approach

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Raden Muhammad Ali ◽  
Aria Candramukti
Keyword(s):  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Terror Attack ◽  
Terror Attacks ◽  
Sociological Approach ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Secret Agent ◽  
Descriptive Qualitative

Nowadays, there are so many people talking and discussing what we called terrorism. However, most of us still do not have sufficient insight related to the kinds, motivations, and purposes of terror attacks. This paper is aimed to find the types of terror attack as reflected in The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad and to show the causes of terror as reflected in the novel. The researchers apply descriptive qualitative as the method of analyzing the data. Some of the research findings are as follows. First, the terror attacks found in the novel are physical and mental. Second, the causes of terror are political and economic.

London

2019 ◽  
pp. 168-220
Author(s):  
Andrew Thacker
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War Two ◽  
Hill Area ◽  
Secret Agent ◽  
The City ◽  
Literary Networks

This chapter considers how London developed as a modernist city, from the late nineteenth century to the period after World War Two. It analyses the geographical emotions produced by particular locations within London, such as the London Underground and Metro-Land suburbs; the cultural institutions of Bloomsbury and Fleet Street; the bohemia of Soho and the nightlife of Piccadilly Circus; and the Notting Hill area settled by postwar immigrants to the city. It considers the affective responses of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Henry James to the material restructuring of the city, before turning to the role of publishers, bookshops, and literary networks in helping establish modernism in the city, in the shape of poetic movements such as the Rhymers and the Imagists. The final part of the chapter analyses texts by two important outsiders in London: Joseph Conrad in The Secret Agent and Sam Selvon in The Lonely Londoners.

Joseph Conrad

2021 ◽  
pp. 36-86
Author(s):  
Charlotte Jones
Keyword(s):  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
The Real ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
Conceptual Clarity ◽  
Abstract Nouns ◽  
Secret Agent ◽  
The Universe

Joseph Conrad famously declared a desire ‘above all, to make you see’, but he also repeatedly deploys abstract nouns—truth, beauty, the universe—to denote his representational ambitions. Discussing Conrad’s use of the idea of the real as an anchor for his fiction, this chapter works across literature and philosophy not by recourse to the model of a ‘lens’ or influence study, but instead examines the ways in which the particularly metaphysical dimension of the representational capacities and incapacities of language reveals the contradictions inherent in our desire to place the objects of our experience in a clear, vivid scheme. What demands do realities beyond our sensory experience make upon us for shape and conceptual clarity? In new readings of Nostromo and The Secret Agent, this chapter explores how Conrad’s use of metaphor and analogy fractures the metonymic chains through which realism moves between the known and the unknown.

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

Conradiana ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-197
Author(s):  
Cedric Watts
Keyword(s):  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Secret Agent

Radioactive Forms: Radium, the State, and the End of Victorian Narrative

Genre ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 151-177
Author(s):  
Michael Martel
Keyword(s):  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Political Form ◽  
Narrative Forms ◽  
English Politics ◽  
Secret Agent ◽  
Energy Physics

This article examines Edwardian “radioactive fiction”—narratives about radium’s transformative political implications—to demonstrate how radioactivity shaped narrative form and English politics between 1898 and 1914. Recent scholarship on this period’s literary engagements with energy physics and politics shows that thermodynamics’ second law provided the narrative structures that shaped turn-of-the-century scientific, cultural, and political discourses. At this moment, however, radioactivity upended these “entropolitical” narrative forms through its seemingly endless self-regeneration. Attending to this narratological and scientific upheaval, the article argues that formal experiments as varied as Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent ([1907] 2007) and H. G. Wells’s World Set Free (1914) exemplify a widespread regrounding of narrative and political form in a universe where the fundamental laws of energy no longer apply. The article first examines how espionage, detective, and invasion fiction, exemplified by The Secret Agent, incorporated the Edwardian press’s figuration of radium to suggest that the entropic nation-state’s raison d’être, degenerate populations, was not so entropic after all. It then examines utopian treatments of radioactivity to argue that nonentropic narrative forms modeled political orders beyond the nation-state. Through narrative chiasmus, The World Set Free figures an atomic state capable of organizing its constituent parts into a new collectivity, the global atomic commons.

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