Various Dimensions of the Other in Joseph Conrads Fiction

This collection of studies examines the various types and uses of ideas of the other and othering in Joseph Conrads 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 Conrads fiction. The first three papers offer insights into Conrads 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 Conrads 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 Conrads 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 Conrads Fiction features both general theoretical arguments and distinctive methodological approaches to Conrads oeuvre, such as historical contextualization and source studies, postcolonial theory, imagology, Levinass 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 Conrads 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 Conrads oeuvre, Various Dimensions of the Other in Joseph Conrads Fiction continues and strengthens the transnational profile of the series Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives.