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"Our Conrad" is a literary and cultural history, political in emphasis, of the modern American invention of Joseph Conrad as a "master" literary figure as well as a call to transnationalize the field of American literary and cultural studies.
About the author
Peter Lancelot Mallios is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Maryland. He is a co-editor, with Carola Kaplan and Andrea White, of Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives (2005)
Summary
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.
Additional text
"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, as well as readers outside academia who want to understand the connection of America with the rest of the world during the early twentieth century."
