Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Constructing the imperial subject: nineteenth-century travel writing
- 2 Adventure fiction: a special case
- 3 Them and us: a useful and appealing fiction
- 4 The shift toward subversion: the case of H. Rider Haggard
- 5 Travel writing and adventure fiction as shaping discourses for Conrad
- 6 Almayer's Folly
- 7 An Outcast of the Islands
- 8 The African fictions (I): “An Outpost of Progress”
- 9 The African fictions (II): “Heart of Darkness”
- Coda
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Constructing the imperial subject: nineteenth-century travel writing
- 2 Adventure fiction: a special case
- 3 Them and us: a useful and appealing fiction
- 4 The shift toward subversion: the case of H. Rider Haggard
- 5 Travel writing and adventure fiction as shaping discourses for Conrad
- 6 Almayer's Folly
- 7 An Outcast of the Islands
- 8 The African fictions (I): “An Outpost of Progress”
- 9 The African fictions (II): “Heart of Darkness”
- Coda
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
As a general rule, the British novel-reader likes the scenes of his story to be laid in British soil. He is insular in his tastes, not easily interested in places and people who are outside his experience. When a writer contrives to hold his attention with such topics it is proof that he has handled them exceptionally well.
(Sherry (ed.), Conrad, p. 66)Thus James Payn, a popular contemporary novelist, began his review of An Outcast of the Islands for The Illustrated London News in April 1896. Payn goes on to congratulate Conrad for his ability to hold the reader's attention. But the observation that British novel readers are insular is puzzling when we remember Andrew Lang's contention a few years earlier, borne out by sales figures, that exotic literature enjoyed a great popularity (see chapter 1). Of course, as an admirer of “Henley's Regatta,” Lang opposed the Grundyism abroad, a powerful faction that in the 1890s found the domestic fiction to be more respectable and uplifting, dealing as it did with far less objectionable matters than did the exotic fiction Lang championed. However, this reviewer must have noticed that the News itself ran serially much of the adventure fiction and travel writing of the day, contained numerous articles about colonial possessions, usually elaborately illustrated, and reviewed and recommended books on related subjects frequently. That he nonetheless found Conrad's work “exceptional” suggests the contemporary resistance, already mentioned in chapter 4, to the popular adventure genre.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition , pp. 116 - 133Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993