What are the fingerprints of Joseph Conrad's fiction? This richly illustrated book argues that Conrad's vibrant details set him apart as a writer and brings them from the margins to the center for study. With recently discovered primary sources - including drawings and maps in Conrad's own hand - this book travels widely across Conrad's fiction and explores its interest in marginal voices, characters and details. It produces a new picture of Conrad as a writer, and the first picture of Conrad as an amateur sketch artist. Introducing new critical vocabulary and applying new names from art history to Conrad studies, the book ranges across cartography, fashion, analytic philosophy, manuscript studies, and animal studies to discover Conrad as an artist operating across and between different media. Offered as a complement to the abstract approaches of much literary theory, this detail-driven and margin-focused monograph mirrors the characteristic granular nature of Conrad's fiction.

'… a valuable and unique contribution to Conrad scholarship … Recommended’

J. G. Peters Source: Choice

‘a convincing and original perspective … reverses the meaning of literary marginality as we know it today’

Tania Zulli Source: The Cambridge Quarterly

‘This is a bold and imaginative book’

Kim Salmons Source: Modern Fiction Studies

‘an impressive series of critical firsts’

Nic Panagopoulos Source: English Studies

‘a thoroughly diverting book’

Hugh Epstein Source: The Conradian

‘Warodell points to a goldmine of descriptive detail in Conrad’

Beci Carver Source: English

‘Conrad’s Decentred Fiction reaches those parts other studies cannot reach, and Warodell observes things about Conrad’s work that no critic has observed before’

Nic Panagopoulos Source: Joseph Conrad Today

‘like no other book of Conrad criticism … a cabinet of curiosities: a collection of details that Conradians have consistently overlooked’

Yael Levin Source: Journal of Modern Literature

‘Warodell’s text is an invaluable and innovative addition not only to Conrad studies, but also to the fields of digital humanities, archival research, analytic philosophy, and other literary theories and close-readings.’

John Attridge Source: The Modernist Review