Tales of Unrest

Description

The five stories brought together in Tales of Unrest (1898) mark a turning point in the writer's career. Conrad's first short story collection evidences a writer firmly in control of his new craft staking a claim to diverse cultural and fictional territories. The introduction situates the writing of these stories in Conrad's career and discusses their sources and contemporary reception. The explanatory notes identify literary and historical references and real-life places, and indicate influences. Two maps and six illustrations enrich the explanatory matter. The essay on the text lays out the history of the work's composition and publication, details interventions by Conrad's typists, compositors and editors, and explains editorial policy. This edition, established through modern textual scholarship, presents Conrad's stories and his preface to the collection in forms more authoritative than any so far printed.

Allan H. Simmons is Professor of English at St Mary's College, Twickenham, London. 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 latest instalment in the Cambridge edition of Conrad's collected works, edited by Allan H. Simmons and J. H. Stape, aims to recover an experience of reading Conrad stripped of the interventions that produced the texts with which we are now familiar ... Conrad studies today, much like Conrad's career then, are in vital, vibrant form.' Andrew Purssell, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920