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Mar 10, 2009 | ISBN 9781400095865 Buy
May 25, 2011 | ISBN 9780307794086 Buy
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Mar 10, 2009 | ISBN 9781400095865
May 25, 2011 | ISBN 9780307794086
In this authoritative, insightful biography, we see the modernist master Joseph Conrad as a man who consistently reinvented himself. Born in 1857 in the Ukraine, he left home early and worked as a sailor, traveling to the Far East and Africa, and eventually settled in England, beginning a precarious existence as a novelist. John Stape describes a man with a deep sense of otherness, a writer who wrote in his third language and whose fiction became the cornerstone of modernism. With his exceptional understanding of Conrad, Stape succeeds in casting a new light on the life of a man who remains one of the greatest writers of his, and our, time.
* Please note: The eBook version of this title is slightly different from the paperback version. While the textual content remains the same, the illustrations/photographs were removed from the eBook version because of permissions issues.The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad is the first new biography in more than a decade of one of modern literature’s most important writers–whose work remains widely read and acutely relevant eighty years after his death. In this authoritative, insightful book, we see Joseph Conrad as a man who consistently reinvented himself. Born in 1857 in Berdichev, Ukraine, he left home early and worked as a sailor out of Marseilles; traveled to the Far East and Africa with the British merchant navy; and, finally, in 1891, settled in England, beginning a precarious existence as an novelist and family man. Here is a Conrad for our moment: a man with a deep sense of otherness; a writer with multiple cultural identities who wrote in his third language and whose fiction became the cornerstone of literary Modernism.With his exceptional knowledge and understanding of Conrad, and drawing on unpublished letters and documents, John Stape succeeds in casting an illuminating new light on the life of a willfully enigmatic man who remains one of the greatest writers of his, and our, time.
John Stape is Research Fellow at St. Mary’s University College, London. He has taught at universities in Canada, France, and the Far East. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad and co-editor of two volumes of… More about John Stape
“Brilliantly concise and often witty. . . . Stape has pressed into one volume all the basic factual information anyone is likely to want to know about Conrad’s life.” —The Washington Post Book World“A balanced, detailed, thoroughly researched book that is filled with fresh insights into this rather enigmatic man. . . . Terrific.” —Tucson Citizen“Stape flushes out many facts we’ve not seen before. He sets various records straight, debunking myths about Conrad.” —The Weekly Standard "Stape’s desire to strip out the myths and not to add more is to be admired. . . . There [are] wonderful glimpses of [Conrad] through the eyes of his friends." —The Economist"Stape delivers a usefully compact . . . biography that draws on material not available to his predecessors." —The Seattle Times
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