Joseph Conrad and the Swan Song of Romance

Joseph Conrad and the Swan Song of Romance Katherine Isobel Baxter Farnham: Ashgate, 2010 172 pp.Conrad and RomanceWhen J.M. Dent published a collected edition of Conrad's early works in 1923, Virginia Woolf wrote a review for The Nation and Athenaeum presenting two individuals debating the merits of Conrad's career and literary legacy. One of the several points of criticism raised against Conrad has to do with his status as a "romantic" writer. As one of the speakers comments, "of course, it goes without saying that he [Conrad] is a romantic. No one objects to that. But it entails a terrible penalty - death at the age of forty - death or disillusionment . . . But Conrad has never faced his disillusionment. He goes on singing the same song about sea captains and the sea, beautiful, noble, and monotonous; but now I think with a crack in the flawless strain of his youth" (Woolf 377). The other speaker, of course, disagrees, but this critique of Conrad as a "romantic" is not directly addressed, let alone resolved, by the review's end. Woolf is not the first and certainly not the last reader to raise questions concerning romance in Conrad's texts. Indeed, readers have debated the nature of Conrad's engagement with romance and its effect on the quality of his work from his own time to today. Doubtless one of the reasons that this issue has remained of perennial interest is that any attempt to address it produces a profusion of interconnected questions - questions of form (What is "romance"? Which Conrad texts, or which parts of which Conrad texts, engage it?); questions of genealogy and evolution (What specific romance traditions does Conrad draw upon? How does he alter these traditions?); questions of function (What is the role of romance within late nineteenth and early twentieth-century British society?); questions of culture and value (Who read romance? Who determined its status in relation to other literary forms?).In Joseph Conrad and the Swan Song of Romance, Katherine Isobel Baxter brings new vigor to this discussion by connecting romance with modernist innovation. Using Robert Miles's paradigm of "philosophical" and "anti-philosophical" romance, drawn primarily form his essay "What is a Romantic Novel?"1 Baxter demonstrates ways in which Conrad's deployment of romance is often experimental in nature. Focusing on texts from a wide stretch of his career, from Heart of Darkness (1899) to The Rover (1923), Baxter provides compelling insight into the ways that Conrad deploys romance tropes to engage and often to undermine colonial and domestic ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Moreover, her readings deftly elucidate how in many of Conrad's works romance turns back upon itself, revealing the role that romance and narrative can play in perpetuating such ideologies by obscuring the mechanisms through which they work.Baxter positions her contribution to the field of Conrad studies in opposition to Thomas Moser 's famous reading of Conrad's career as a trajectory of achievement and decline, which designates Conrad's major works as spanning from The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (1897) to The ShadowLine (191 7).2 Moser claims that Conrad's later fictions, as well as some of his earlier works that Moser finds of lesser value, display an interest in love plots and women at the expense of focusing on more serious and political subject matter, a shift that is coupled with a turn from the more respectable genre of historical realism to romance. Baxter's position is thus in line with several other relatively recent critical works that oppose aspects of Moser's thesis. These works include Jeremy Hawthorn's Sexuality and Erotics in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad (2007), Lissa Schneider's Conrad's Narratives of Difference: Not Exactly Tales for Boys (2003), and Susan Jones's Conrad and Women (2000). While each of these works addresses issues of genre at some level, Baxter's text differs in making the genre of romance her central focus and by using Miles's paradigm to do so. …