Description
Book SynopsisWhen Joseph Conrad’s novel Chance appeared in serial form in the New York Herald in 1912 and in book form in 1914 it established the author’s financial security for the first time. Following years of struggle to reach a wide audience for his fiction, Conrad benefitted from the American marketing of this novel for the women readers of romance. Aggressive advertising promoted the writer’s new focus on a female protagonist and Conrad’s division of the story’s location between land and sea. The novel proved popular and lucrative. Yet in spite of its economic success, Chance remains one of Conrad’s less well-known narratives. This fresh new collection of essays from both young and established scholars opens up a lively critical debate taking Chance beyond the status of best-selling romance. In a striking re-evaluation of the novel these writers examine Chance’s innovative narrative strategies, its up-to-the-minute commentary on female politics, contemporary ethics, as well as its antecedents in classical debate and the significance of Conrad’s last use of his seaman narrator Marlow.
Table of ContentsForeword “The shore gang”: Chance and the Ethics of Work Andrew Glazzard Rortyian Contingency and Ethnocentrism in Chance Jay Parker Speech, Affect, and Intervention in Chance Anne Enderwitz Marlow, Socrates, and an Ancient Quarrel in Chance Debra Romanick Baldwin Chance and Its Intertextualities Ewa Kujawska-Lis The “girl-novel”: Chance and Woolf’s The Voyage Out E. H. Wright “Fine-weather books”: Representations of Readers and Reading in Chance Helen Chambers From Incapable “Angel in the House” to Invincible “New Woman” in Marlovian Narratives: Representing Womanhood in “Heart of Darkness” and Chance Pei-Wen Clio Kao “Let that Marlow talk”: Chance and the Narrative Problem of Marlow John G. Peters Chance: Conrad’s A Portrait of a Feminist Yumiko Iwashimizu Ships in the Night: Intimacy, Narration, and the Endless Near Misses of Chance Mark Deggan Contributors
