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About
Our Conrad is 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 figures-including Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Richard Wright, Woodrow Wilson, and Theodore and Edith Roosevelt-and 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.
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Reviews
"Our Conrad is one of the most stimulating works of scholarship I have read in some time. Mallios weaves his tale masterfully and convinces me that Conrad-in-America was much more significant than I had realized-that the reception of Conrad in America says as much about America as it does about Conrad. Our Conrad will be embraced by scholars in English and American literature and American history,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
"Our Conrad is a strikingly original study of cultural influence, a landmark study not of the works of Joseph Conrad but of the various understandings of Conrad held by American writers as they struggled to combine American-ness with modernism. Mallios's account opens up, in dramatically new ways, such impacted conceptual oppositions as self and other, foreign and domestic, native and alien. And i
National Humanities Center