Description
Book SynopsisWith the pressing work of decolonising our reading lists gaining traction in UK higher educational contexts,
Decolonising the Conrad Canon shows how those author-Gods most associated with the colonial literary canon can also be retooled through decolonial, queer, feminist readings. This book finds pockets of powerful anti-colonial resistance and queer dissonance in Joseph Conrad’s lesser-known works – breathing spaces from the colonial rhetoric that dominates his novels – and traces the female characters who voice them off the page and into their transmedia (digital/illustrative/cinematic) afterlives. From Immada and Edith’s queer gaze in
The Rescue and the periodical illustrations that accompanied its initial serialization, to Aïssa’s sustained critique of imperialism in
An Outcast of the Islands and her portrayal on mass-market paperback book covers, to the structural female bonds of
Almayer’s Folly and Nina’s embodiment in Chantal Akerman’s adaptation
La Folie Almayer, this book centres Conrad’s female characters as viable, meaning-making citizens of the canon. Through this intervention,
Decolonising the Conrad Canon proposes an innovative model for teaching, reading and studying not just Joseph Conrad’s work but the colonial literary canon more broadly.
Trade Review'New books on Conrad appear with such regularity that one wonders if there is anything new to say on the author, but in
Decolonising the Conrad Canon, Alice M. Kelly proves that original approaches are by no means exhausted. This volume offers refreshing and challenging new readings of Conrad’s Malay fiction within a stimulating and compelling re-evaluation of women and gender in these novels.'
- Linda Dryden, Professor of English Literature, Edinburgh Napier University
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Dead White Man
Part 1:
The Rescue
1. Female Homoeroticism and
The Rescue’s ‘Lesbian Context’2. The ‘Invisible Lesbian’ in the
Land and Water Illustrations of
The Rescue
Part 2:
An Outcast of the Islands
3. Aïssa: Agency, Race and the Articulation of Desire in
An Outcast of the Islands4. Trash Conrad: Pulps, Paratexts and Protagonists
Part 3:
Almayer’s Folly
5. ... and Nina and Taminah and Mrs Almayer6. ‘Full-Bodied’: Embodiment in Chantal Akerman’s
La Folie Almayer
Conclusion: Breathing Spaces and Afterlives
