Notes on Life and Letters

Description

The twenty-six essays collected in Notes on Life and Letters (first published 1921) offer a kaleidoscopic view of Joseph Conrad's literary views and interest in the events of his day, including the Titanic disaster, First World War, and the re-emergence of his native Poland as a nation state. The introduction gives the history of the gathering of these diverse pieces into a single volume, traces the book's reception, and offers new perspectives on its relationship to Conrad's other writings. His essays underwent multiple layers of unauthorized intervention by typists, compositors and editors: this history is set out in the essay on the text and in the apparatus. The notes explain literary and historical references, identify places mentioned, and gloss foreign terms. Two maps supplement the explanatory material. This edition, established through modern textual scholarship, presents Conrad's essays and reviews in a form more authoritative than any hitherto printed.

J. H. Stape, a Research Fellow in St Mary's University College at Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, has taught in universities in Canada, France and the Far East, and has published extensively on Conrad's life and work. The editor of The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (1996), he has also edited Conrad's A Personal Record and Notes on Life and Letters and co-edited Volume Seven and Nine of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad for Cambridge University Press. General Editor of seven Conrad volumes in Penguin Classics, he serves as contributing editor to The Conradian: The Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK). He has also written on Thomas Hardy, Virginia, Woolf, William Golding and Angus Wilson.

"This volume--with its thoughtful and thorough essays, Notes, and Apparatus--constitutes an excellent casebook on the making of critical editions. More importantly, of course, it is a major contribution to Conrad scholarship and will undoubtedly become the authoritative foundation for further research and writing on this richly varied collection of the author's journalistic writings." - Wallace Watson, Duquesne University