Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T14:35:46.242Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Absentee Capitalism and the Politics of Conrad's Imperial Novels

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Regina Martin
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The nature of Joseph Conrad's critique of imperialism, given his novels' pervasive racism, persists as a source of debate. his essay argues that three of his imperial novels, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and Victory, take aim at an emerging system of imperialism organized around the modern, investorowned corporation. his system, referred to here as “absentee capitalism,” was replacing the nineteenthcentury British system of relatively small, familybased irms. he novels idealize the familyowned irm as having a presence of material value, meaning, and afect that contrasts with the wasted value let in the wake of absentee capitalism's invisible and everchanging network of social relations. According to this interpretation, Victory, which has been marginalized in Conrad studies, takes on renewed import for its insight into the relation among imperialism, romance, and modernism in Conrad's oeuvre.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 130 , Issue 3 , May 2015 , pp. 584 - 598
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Anderson, Perry. “Origins of the Present Crisis.” New Left Review 1st ser. 23 (1964): 26–53. Print.Google Scholar
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Print.Google Scholar
Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. New York: Verso, 1994. Print.Google Scholar
Artese, Brian. Testimony on Trial: Conrad, James, and the Contest for Modernism. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bakan, Joel. The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. New York: Viking, 2004. Print.Google Scholar
Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Print.Google Scholar
Baxter, Katherine Isobel. Joseph Conrad and the Swan Song of Romance. Burlington: Ashgate, 2010. Print.Google Scholar
Bongie, Chris. Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. Print.Google Scholar
Bowman, Scott R. The Modern Corporation and American Political Thought. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1996. Print.Google Scholar
Brantlinger, Patrick. “Heart of Darkness: Anti-imperialism, Racism, or Impressionism?” Criticism 27.4 (1985): 363–85. JSTOR. Web. 3 Mar. 2014.Google Scholar
Collits, Terry. Postcolonial Conrad: Paradoxes of Empire. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.Google Scholar
Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim. 1900. Ed. Moser, Thomas C. New York: Norton, 1996. Print.Google Scholar
Conrad, Joseph. Nostromo. 1904. Ed. Sherry, Norman. New York: Everyman, 1979. Print.Google Scholar
Conrad, Joseph. Victory. 1915. New York: Doubleday, 1926. Print.Google Scholar
Dauncy, Sarah. “‘The Islands Are Very Quiet’: Space and Silence in Conrad's Victory.” Conradiana 42.1-2 (2010): 141–54. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DiBattista, Maria. Novel Characters: A Genealogy. Malden: Wiley, 2010. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
GoGwilt, Christopher. The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
GoGwilt, Christopher. The Passage of Literature: Genealogies of Modernism in Conrad, Rhys, and Pramoedya. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.Google Scholar
Harvey, David. The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis of Capitalism. London: Profile, 2010. Print.Google Scholar
Henthorne, Tom. Conrad's Trojan Horses: Imperialism, Hybridity, and the Postcolonial Aesthetic. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP, 2008. Print.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Empire, 1875-1914. New York: Vintage, 1989. Print.Google Scholar
Hobson, J. A. Imperialism: A Study. London: Allen, 1938. Print.Google Scholar
Hunt, Bishop Carleton. The Development of the Business Corporation in England, 1800-1867. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1936. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. “Modernism and Imperialism.” The Modernist Papers. New York: Verso, 2007. 152–69. Print.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. Print.Google Scholar
Jeffers, Thomas L. “The Logic of Material Interests in Conrad's Nostromo.” Raritan: A Quarterly Review 23.2 (2003): 80–111. Academic Search Complete. Web. 12 May 2013.Google Scholar
Lenin, V. I. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. 1917. Moscow: Progress, 1975. Print.Google Scholar
Levenson, Michael. Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic Form from Conrad to Woolf. New York: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lynch, Deidre Shauna. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Print.Google Scholar
Mallios, Peter Lancelot. “Declaring Victory: Toward Conrad's Poetics of Democracy.” Conradiana 35.3 (2003): 145–83. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 Mar. 2013.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. Capital. Trans. Fowkes, Ben. Vol. 1. New York: Penguin, 1979. Print.Google Scholar
Mickalites, Carey James. Modernism and Market Fantasy: British Fictions of Capital, 1910-1939. New York: Palgrave, 2012. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parry, Benita. Conrad and Imperialism. London: Macmillan, 1983. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perkin, Harold. The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880. New York: Routledge, 1989. Print.Google Scholar
Ross, Stephen. Conrad and Empire. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2004. Print.Google Scholar
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1993. Print.Google Scholar
Sayeau, Michael. Against the Event: The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schmitt, Cannon. “Rumor, Shares, and Novelistic Form: Joseph Conrad's Nostromo.” Victorian Investments: New Perspectives on Finance and Culture. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009. 182–201. ProQuest. Web. 3 June 2013.Google Scholar
Veblen, Thorstein. Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprises in Recent Times: The Case of America. New York: Huebsch, 1923. Print.Google Scholar
Wollaeger, Mark. “Conrad's Darkness Revisited: Mediated Warfare and the Modern(ist) Propaganda in Heart of Darkness and ”The Unlighted Coast.'“ Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives. Ed. Kaplan, Carola M., Mallios, Peter, and White, Andrea. New York: Routledge, 2005. 67–84. Print.Google Scholar
Woolf, Virginia. “Character in Fiction.” 1923. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Ed. McNeillie, Andrew. Vol. 2 (1919-24). New York: Harcourt, 1988. 420–38. Print.Google Scholar