Outposts of Progress: Joseph Conrad, Modernism and Post-Colonialism

The first international conference ever held in Africa on the works of author Joseph Conrad took place in 1998, to mark the centenary of the publication of Heart of Darkness. This book draws its title from Conrad’s short story, ‘An Outpost of Progress’ which represented the responses of a European to colonial settler assumptions about progress and backwardness, in the light of his first-hand experience of Europeans in Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. The
13 essays in this collection engage directly with the ways in which Conrad’s fiction explores and problematises the notion of ‘progress’, not only at the time when he was writing but now, more than a century later.

 

Although the relationship between modernist and postcolonial literature has been theorised by critics in Britain, Europe and America since the late 1980s, for the first time, this book brings these debates to Africa.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1 Humans and Animals in Conrad’s ‘An Outpost of Progress’ - KAI WIEGANDT
2 Bloody Racists of 1899: Some Fictional Contexts for Conrad’s Alleged Racism in Heart of Darkness - ANDREW GLAZZARD
3 Penetrating the Impenetrable in Conrad’s Fiction - JEREMY HAWTHORN
4 Heart of Darkness as Chronotope: Conradian Avatars in Fiction, Criticism, Publishing and Pedagogy - RUSSELL WEST-PAVLOV
5 At the Dying of Two Centuries: Heart of Darkness and Disgrace - DAVID MEDALIE
6 Victory Music and the World of Finance - KONSTANTIN SOFIANOS
7 The Paradox of Progress: Far-reaching Deliberations and 10 per cent Loans - ROBERT HAMPSON
8 Heroes of the Real: Conrad’s Epic Without a Cause - JOSIANE PACCAUD-HUGUET
9 Being Elsewhere: Conrad, Malinowski, and the Anxiety of Storytelling - DAPHNA ERDINAST-VULCAN
10 Going About: Conrad’s Progress in A Personal Record - DOUGLAS KERR
11 Duo, Trio and Quartette – A Comparative Reading of Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osborne’s The Ebb-Tide and Joseph Conrad’s ‘An Outpost of Progress’ - JÜRGEN KRAMER
12 Irony and Distance: Variants of Narrative and Imperialist Critique in Conrad’s ‘An Outpost of Progress’ - JAKOB LOTHE
13 ‘Positioning’ the Reader in Conrad’s Marlow Narratives and in Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat - GAIL FINCHAM

Notes on contributors

Index

Recommended for

General readers and scholars interested in Conrad and postcolonial literature.

About the editors

Gail Fincham is Emerita Professor in the Department of English at the University of Cape Town. She has edited and contributed to many books on Conrad and postcolonial literature. She is author of Dance of Life: the novels of Zakes Mda in post-apartheid South Africa (UCT Press: 2011). Jeremy Hawthorn is Emeritus Professor of Modern British Literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He has published three monographs and many articles on the fiction of Joseph Conrad, and monographs and articles on narrative and on literary theory. Jakob Lothe is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oslo. He has written and contributed to many volumes on modernism and narrative in literature.

The first international conference ever held in Africa on the works of author Joseph Conrad took place in 1998, to mark the centenary of the publication of Heart of Darkness. This book draws its title from Conrad’s short story, ‘An Outpost of Progress’ which represented the responses of a European to colonial settler assumptions about progress and backwardness, in the light of his first-hand experience of Europeans in Africa at the end of the nineteenth century.