Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles) ISSN (Print) 0008-199X - ISSN (Online) 1471-6836 Published by Oxford University Press[396 journals]
Abstract: Francesca Brooks is in the final year of her PhD with the English Department at King's College London. Her AHRC-LAHP-funded thesis is titled ‘Poet of the Medieval Modern: Reading the Anglo-Saxon Library with David Jones'. PubDate: Thu, 30 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfy024 Issue No:Vol. 47, No. 3 (2018)
Authors:Wilkinson C. Pages: 201 - 221 Abstract: Twentieth-century criticism ofNostromo (1904) often returns to the problem of the novel’s so-called ‘empty centre’. E. M Forster’s famous description of Conrad as ‘misty in the middle as well as at the edges’ relates to a perceived lack of integrity in the essays collected as Notes on Life and Letters in 1921, but it might well be appropriated as a description of the novelist’s narrative strategy.11 To misquote Forster’s criticism in this way is to argue for the primacy of a necessary difficulty found in Conrad’s rhetorical and narrative orders: a mistiness with a stylistic, as well as moral, function. The claim is particularly true of Nostromo, a novel populated by an array of puppet-like characters each dedicated to a singular or rarefied idea. The interconnected tales of these individuals revolve about the mysteriously ephemeral and yet problematically substantial San Tomé silver, and are told in a stubbornly non-chronological arrangement of diverging analeptic accounts. At no point does the reader catch up with the narrative present, set in a perpetually suspended future some time after the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company’s Captain Mitchell retires to England with $17,000 shares in the Consolidated San Tomé Mines safely in his pocket.22 Instead, Costaguana’s haphazard succession of rulers and dictators emerges from and retreats over the Sulaco mountains in a non-linear sequence which resists the historical timeline of the story’s events. Nostromo thereby occupies an atemporal and shifting present, the deferral of a purchase in time giving the narrative the sense of existing all at once; the ‘misty’ qualities of Conrad’s writing are integral to the novel’s style. Forster, of course, didn’t mean this by his review. ‘[T]he secret casket of his genius’, it goes on to say, ‘contains a vapour rather than a jewel.’33 This essay looks at the connection between these empty centres, vapour-filled caskets, and a vision of the international economy developed in Nostromo. It argues that Conrad is engaged in the production of a profound irony, which functions as a comment upon the much more significant ‘empty centre’ of capitalism’s acquisitive nature. This irony is as much a part of the novel’s form and style as it is of its ideology: a study of Nostromo’s economic logic reveals Conrad’s representation of material substance and the financial structures it operates within as radical. Taking a ‘New Economic’ critical approach to the novelist’s writing advances established Marxist and postcolonial readings of his work, and has consequences for how we might imagine the relationship between language and value in early twentieth-century fiction more widely.44 PubDate: Thu, 30 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfy018 Issue No:Vol. 47, No. 3 (2018)
Authors:Hazrat F. Pages: 222 - 242 Abstract: That loseth nor locketh holdeth me in prisonAnd holdeth me not yet can I scape no wise PubDate: Thu, 30 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfy019 Issue No:Vol. 47, No. 3 (2018)
Authors:Brooks F. Pages: 279 - 285 Abstract: The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others by CostelloBonnie. Princeton University Press, 2017. $37.95. ISBN 9 7806 9117 2811 PubDate: Thu, 30 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfy008 Issue No:Vol. 47, No. 3 (2018)
Authors:Nickerson A. Pages: 295 - 299 Abstract: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Poetry of Religious Experience by DuboisMartin. Cambridge University Press, 2017. £75. ISBN 9 7811 0718 0451 PubDate: Thu, 30 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/camqtly/bfy006 Issue No:Vol. 47, No. 3 (2018)
Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)
[396 journals]
