| Conrad's Narratives of Difference: Not Exactly Tales for Boys Contributor(s): Schneider-Rebozo, Lissa (Author) |
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ISBN: 0415966779 ISBN-13: 9780415966771 Publisher: Routledge OUR PRICE: $171.00 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: September 2003 Annotation: Though Joseph Conrad's works are notorious for an absence of female characters, this book demonstrates that he often represented women and femininity in less explicit ways. Lissa Schneider examines many of Conrad's best-known works to show that his oppositional narrative strategies and use of female allegorical imagery challenged late Victorian notions, norms, and goals. This examination of Conrad's best-known works demonstrates how they negotiate the "shadow-line" of Victorian gender, race and class paradigms to clear a space for a modern revisioning of difference. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Collections - Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh |
| Dewey: 823.912 |
| LCCN: 2003002137 |
| Series: Studies in Major Literary Authors |
| Physical Information: 0.65" H x 6.02" W x 9.3" (0.89 lbs) 175 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - British Isles |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: In Joseph Conrad's tales, representations of women and of "feminine" generic forms like the romance are often present in fugitive ways. Conrad's use of allegorical feminine imagery, fleet or deferred introductions of female characters, and hybrid generic structures that combine features of "masculine" tales of adventure and intrigue and "feminine" dramas of love or domesticity are among the subjects of this literary study. Many of Conrad's critics have argued that Conrad's fictions are aesthetically flawed by the inclusion of women and love plots; thus Thomas Moser has questioned why Conrad did not "cut them out altogether." Yet a thematics of gender suffuses Conrad's narrative strategies. Even in tales that contain no significant female characters or obvious love plots, Conrad introduces elusive feminine presences, in relationships between men, as well as in men's relationships to their ship, the sea, a shore breeze, or even in the gendered embrace of death. This book investigates an identifiably feminine "point of view" which is present in fugitive ways throughout Conrad's canon. Conrad's narrative strategies are articulated through a language of sexual difference that provides the vocabulary and grammar for tales examining European class, racial, and gender paradigms to provide acute and, at times, equivocal investigations of femininity and difference. |