Description
Book SynopsisThis collection of thirteen essays by writers from several countries lavishly celebrates the centenary of the publication of Conrad’s The Secret Agent. It reconsiders one of Conrad’s most important political novels from a variety of critical perspectives and presents a stimulating documentary section as well as specially commissioned maps and new contextualizing illustrations. Much new information is provided on the novel’s sources, and the work is placed in new several contexts. The volume is essential reading on this novel both for students studying it as a set text as well as for scholars of the late-Victorian and early Modernist periods.
Table of ContentsForeword Contributors David MULRY: The Anarchist in the House: The Politics of Conrad’s The Secret Agent Paul WAKE: The Time of Death: “Passing Away” in The Secret Agent Patricia PYE: A City that “disliked to be disturbed”: London’s Soundscape in The Secret Agent Yuet May CHING: “A heap of nameless fragments”: Sacrifice, Cannibalism, and Fragmentation in The Secret Agent David PRICKETT: No Escape: Liberation and the Ethics of Self-Governance in The Secret Agent Ellen Burton HARRINGTON: The Female Offender, The New Woman, and Winnie Verloc in The Secret Agent Cedric WATTS: Jews and Degenerates in The Secret Agent Ludmilla VOITKOVSKA and Zofia VORONTSOVA: Textualizing Liminality in The Secret Agent Ludwig SCHNAUDER: The Materialist-Scientific World View in The Secret Agent J. H. STAPE and Allan H. SIMMONS: Tosca’s Kiss: Sardou, Puccini, and The Secret Agent Hugh EPSTEIN: An Analogous Art: Conrad’s The Secret Agent and John Virtue’s London Paintings and Drawings Michael NEWTON: Four Notes on The Secret Agent: Sir William Harcourt, Ford and Helen Rossetti, Bourdin’s Relations, and a Warning Against ∆ Mary BURGOYNE, editor and compiler: Conrad among the Anarchists: Documents on Martial Bourdin and the Greenwich Bombing
