Last Essays

Description

Bringing together work composed from 1890 to 1924, the nineteen pieces collected in the posthumously published Last Essays (1926) serve as a primer to Conrad's wide interests and to the varieties of his style. This edition, supported by an extensive textual apparatus, brings together various prose pieces, including reminiscences, reviews, essays on the sea and politics, as well as several miscellaneous items, including his 'Congo Diary' and the other notebook he kept in Africa in 1890. The introduction situates these writings in Conrad's career, offers new perspectives on Conrad in the marketplace and as a writer of occasional prose and traces the contemporary reception of the volume. The notes explain literary and historical references, identify real-life places and indicate Conrad's main sources. Early drafts and notes for several essays are published here for the first time, making this authoritative critical edition a major contribution to Conrad studies.

Harold Ray Stevens is Professor Emeritus of English at McDaniel College. J. H. Stape is Research Fellow at St Mary's University College, Twickenham, London and has taught at universities in England, Canada, France and the Far East. Author of The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (2007) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (1996), he has edited several of Conrad's texts and is co-editor of Conrad's collected letters (Volumes 7 and 9). He has also published on E. M. Forster, William Golding, Thomas Hardy, Frank Harris, Angus Wilson and Virginia Woolf.

' ... this authoritative critical edition [is] a major contribution to Conradian studies ...'. World Ship Review '... when future Conradians come to explore Last Essays and its contexts, they will find an edition waiting that acts as a peerless guide to their scholarly labours.' Richard Niland, The Conradian