Culture and Commerce in Conrad's Asian Fiction
Cambridge University Press, 6/30/2015
EAN 9781107093980, ISBN10: 1107093988
Hardcover, 252 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm
Language: English
Andrew Francis' Culture and Commerce in Conrad's Asian Fiction is the first book-length critical study of commerce in Conrad's work. It reveals not only the complex connections between culture and commerce in Conrad's Asian fiction, but also how he employed commerce in characterization, moral contexts, and his depiction of relations at a point of advanced European imperialism. Conrad's treatment of commerce - Arab, Chinese and Malay, as well as European - is explored within a historically specific context as intricate and resistant to traditional readings of commerce as simple and homogeneous. Through the analysis of both literary and non-literary sources, this book examines capitalism, colonialism and globalization within the commercial, political and social contexts of colonial Southeast Asia.
1. Commerce and the edge of colonialism
Almayer's Folly
2. Competing for the prizes of commerce and overlordship
An Outcast of the Islands
3. Standing out against the irresistibility of progress
The Rescue
4. Negotiating the nets of commerce and duty
Lord Jim
5. Imperialism, commerce, and the individual
appetites and responsibilities in 'Falk'
6. Testing the West, testing the individual
The Shadow-Line
7. The 'irreducible minimum'
the plantation and comprehensive commercialization in 'The End of the Tether'
8. The rise of the commodity
mining, pan-European financing, and commercial imagination in Victory.