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Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad

by Jeremy Hawthorn

Monograph on sexuality in Conrad’s work, which controversially argues that previous critical assumptions that Conrad is uninterested in sexuality and the erotic is wrong.

  • Imprint: Continuum
  • Series: Continuum Literary Studies
  • Pub. date: 23 Mar 2007
  • ISBN: 9780826495273
192 Pages, hardcover World rights
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Description

Awarded third place for The Adam Gillon Book Award in Conrad Studies 2009

The book presents a sustained critique of the interlinked (and contradictory) views that the fiction of Joseph Conrad is largely innocent of any interest in or concern with sexuality and the erotic, and that when Conrad does attempt to depict sexual desire or erotic excitement then this results in bad writing. Jeremy Hawthorn argues for a revision of the view that Conrad lacks understanding of and interest in sexuality. He argues that the comprehensiveness of Conrad’s vision does not exclude a concern with the sexual and the erotic, and that this concern is not with the sexual and the erotic as separate spheres of human life, but as elements dialectically related to those matters public and political that have always been recognized as central to Conrad’s fictional achievement. The book will open Conrad’s fiction to readings enriched by the insights of critics and theorists associated with Gender Studies and Post-colonialism.

Table of Contents

1. Closeted characters and cloistered critics in ‘Il Conde’, Lord Jim, Victory and The Shadow Line
2. The exotic and the erotic in An Outcast of the Islands and Heart of Darkness
3. The erotics of cruelty in ‘A Smile of Fortune’, ‘The Planter of Malata’, The Secret Agent, Victory and ‘Freya of the Seven Isles’
4. Voyeurism in The Shadow-Line and Under Western Eyes
Conclusion – and?
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Author(s)

Jeremy Hawthorn,

Jeremy Hawthorn is Professor of Modern British Literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and winner of Ian P. Watt Prize for Excellence in Conrad Scholarship 2009. He has recently edited Conrad's Under Western Eyes and The Shadow-Line for the new World's Classics edition (both OUP, 2003) and his other publications include Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment (Edward Arnold, 1990). 

Reviews

“Reading Sexuality and the Erotic is itself akin to a sexual experience – in that, once we have read it we can never read Conrad innocently again … [The book] is an engaging and edifying read, a combination of historical detail and textual analysis that is not only enriching but might also produce an occasional blush.” - Partial Answers

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