Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | C | Conradiana

Pamela King. "Like painting, like music...": Joseph Conrad and the Modernist Sensibility.

Article Excerpt
Pamela King. '... like painting, like music ...": Joseph Conrad and the Modernist Sensibility. Pamela King, 1996. 116 pp. ISBN 0-646-2938-3

This self-published item (with handwritten date of publication) is more a long essay or series of reflections (eighty-three pages of text, thirty-three of notes, bibliography, and index) than a book. Although its references are nearly a decade old, its ideas and insights are still stimulating, with the advantage of adopting perspectives not often used in discussions of Conrad's visual allusions and descriptions. Further, the review of literature about Conrad's visuality, starting from the famous Nigger preface, involves interesting departures from and use of such writers as Joseph Martin, Wilfred Dowden, Michael Fried, Laurence Thornton, and Royal Roussel.

The select bibliography indicates how much reading and research have gone into this slim volume, bearing in mind that the writer is not a young post-doc but a mature student and a journalist with ten years as an art critic. An alumna of several universities, she has produced dissertations involving Conrad, and this study is obviously the distillation of much experience and reflection.

As Pamela King's supervisor indicates in his "Foreword," with, perhaps, a little overstatement, the book "audaciously reconsiders Joseph Conrad's imagination in terms of its bewildering biographical points of origin, and its haunting clusters of predominantly painterly and sculptural imagery" (vii). The claim of King's...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!