Various Dimensions of the Other in Joseph Conrad's Fiction

Book excerpt: This collection of studies examines the various types and uses of ideas of "the other" and othering in Joseph Conrad's fiction. It offers examinations of different aspects of the colonial other both in Africa and Latin America, including a personal reminiscence of American imperialism by a descendant of a character mentioned in Conrad's fiction. The first three papers offer insights into Conrad's artistic presentation of both the historical and concrete side of capitalism and imperialism as well as the universal aspects of these social-political-economic formations. The next four studies theorize the colonial other, from European/Western perspectives and from Third World perspectives. The final four papers concern otherness in seamanship, in terms of the imperial other and alterity, and the female as other, othering by gender. The dimensions of the other in Conrad's fiction that the collection examines are mainly colonial, imperial, and civilizational, set in the realities of geographical space of Africa, Latin America, and the Far East, the reality at sea, and the reality of gendered humanity. They are grounded in various contexts significant for Conrad's epoch: both domestic and pertaining to English and European colonial-imperial overseas expansion, and illuminated from both English/Western and Third World perspectives. Various Dimensions of the Other in Joseph Conrad's Fiction features both general theoretical arguments and distinctive methodological approaches to Conrad's oeuvre, such as historical contextualization and source studies, postcolonial theory, imagology, Levinas's theory of alterity, the Lacanian theory of jouissance, literary feminism, and personal narrative. The book is volume 29 of the series Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives: within this series it offers the first complex and direct treatment of multifarious incarnations of the other in Joseph Conrad's fiction. The studies included create a truly international constellation of criticism, with authors at universities in the United States of America, France, Switzerland, Ukraine, Algeria, Iran, Japan, and Poland. Owing to their unique national and cultural-literary backgrounds and perspectives upon Joseph Conrad's oeuvre, Various Dimensions of the Other in Joseph Conrad's Fiction continues and strengthens the transnational profile of the series Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives.