Our Conrad Constituting American Modernity [Paperback]

Our Conradis about the American reception of Joseph Conrad and its crucial role in the formation of American modernism. Although Conrad did not visit the country until a year before his death, his fiction served as both foil and mirror to America's conception of itself and its place in the world.Peter Mallios reveals the historical and political factors that made Conrad's work valuable to a range of prominent figuresincluding Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Richard Wright, Woodrow Wilson, and Theodore and Edith Rooseveltand explores regional differences in Conrad's reception. He proves that foreign-authored writing can be as integral a part of United States culture as that of any native. Arguing that an individual writer's apparent (national, gendered, racial, political) identity is not always a good predictor of the diversity of voices and dialogues to which he gives rise, this exercise in transnational comparativism participates in post-Americanist efforts to render American Studies less insular and parochial.Our Conradis a literary and cultural history, political in emphasis, of the modern American invention of Joseph Conrad as a master literary figure as well as a call to transnationalize the field of American literary and cultural studies. Our Conradis an exemplary work of scholarship and criticism, deeply researched, subtly argued, and lucidly perceptive in its tracing of these codings and recodings. . . Mallios's book is too rich in its detail, too wide-ranging in its scope, and too subtle in its argument to be adequately represented in a review. It is possible, in the space available, only to point to some of the highlights. Peter Lancelot Mallios is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Maryland. He is a co-editor, with Carola Kaplan and Andrea White, ofConrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives(2005) Peter Lancelot Mallios'sOur Conrad: Constituting American ModernlÃ<