The Shadow-Line: A Confession

Description

Joseph Conrad's short novel The Shadow-Line: A Confession (1917) is one of the key works of early twentieth-century fiction. This edition, established through modern textual scholarship, and published as part of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad, presents Conrad's only major work written during the First World War and its 1920 preface in forms more authoritative than any so far printed. Correspondence reveals that the part- and chapter-divisions present in the historical editions lack authorial sanction, and this edition of The Shadow-Line offers a continuous text for the first time, restoring to the narrative a fluency and dramatic intensity not hitherto found in any printing. An Introduction and Explanatory Notes, as well as maps and illustrations, enrich this volume. The Appendices publish materials relevant to Conrad's maritime career and to the publishing of the American serial, and the Apparatus allows the reader to follow the creative process.

J. H. Stape, Senior Research Fellow in English at St Mary's University College, Twickenham, London, has taught at universities in England, Canada, France and the Far East. The author of The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (2007) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (1996), he has edited Conrad texts for Penguin Books and Oxford World's Classics and co-edited Volumes 7 and 9 of Conrad's Collected Letters. He has also published on E. M. Forster, William Golding, Thomas Hardy, Frank Harris, Angus Wilson and Virginia Woolf. Allan H. Simmons, Professor of English at St Mary's University College, Twickenham, London, is the author of Joseph Conrad (2006) in Palgrave's Critical Issues series and Heart of Darkness: A Reader's Guide (2007) for Continuum. He has edited Conrad in Context (2009) and for Penguin Classics has co-edited Lord Jim and The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' and Other Stories (2007). He is the General Editor of The Conradian: The Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK). Owen Knowles, Research Fellow at the University of Hull, is the author of A Conrad Chronology (1989) and An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Joseph Conrad (1992) and co-author of the Oxford Reader's Companion to Conrad (2000). Advisory Editor to The Conradian: The Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society, he has also edited a number of Conrad's works for Everyman's Library and Penguin Books and has co-edited Volumes 6 and 9 of Conrad's Collected Letters and two volumes of correspondence to and about Conrad.

'... provides us the opportunity for both an authentic and illuminating reading of the work not offered elsewhere.' The Times Literary Supplement 'With this very fine edition, the editors have enabled the recuperation and examination of many diverse perspectives on Conrad's late novella.' Justin Tonra, The Conradian