Conrad and the First World War

During the First World War, Conrad believed himself peripheral to a transitional historical moment. In November 1914, he wrote: 'the thoughts of this war sit on one's chest like a nightmare. I am painfully aware of being crippled, of being idle, of being useless with a sort of absurd anxiety' (CL 5, 427). In August 1915, Conrad felt the 'world of 15 years ago is gone to pieces; what will come in its place God knows, but I imagine doesn't care' (CL 5, 503). The political forces of nineteenth-century Europe that had fashioned Conrad's literature, notably imperialism and nationalism, were undermined and unleashed anew by the violence of the Great War and the uncertain legacy of the conflict. Conrad closely observed Poland's fate throughout the war in his relationship with Polish activist Józef Retinger, which inspired 'A Note on the Polish Problem' (1916) and 'The Crime of Partition' (1919). While 1918 saw the political rebirth of Poland, antagonisms provoked by the redrawing of Europe's historical boundaries made Conrad uneasy. On Armistice Day, he wrote: 'The great sacrifice is consummated - and what will come of it to the nations of the earth the future will show. I can not confess to an easy mind. Great and very blind forces are set free catastrophically all over the world' (CL 6, 302)

Conrad and Intellectual Movements

In The Historical Novel (1937), Georg Lukács wrote that Walter Scott 'had no knowledge of Hegel's philosophy and had he come across it would probably not have understood a word' (Lukács, p. 30). Conversely, Conrad's fiction incorporated a wealth of historical, philosophical, and aesthetic ideas resulting from the writer's overt dialogue with nineteenth-century European thought. The philosophy of Rousseau, Herder, Hegel, the Polish Romantics and Positivists, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson represents the intellectual backdrop to Conrad's explorations of individual and communal identity

Conrad: The Critical Response, 1950-75

Following his positioning as a major English novelist by F.R. Leavis in The Great Tradition (1948), Conrad became a central figure in academic literary criticism in the 1950s and 1960s with the publication of a series of seminal works on the writer. With studies by Thomas Moser, Albert Guerard and Edward Said, the period saw the beginning of the Conrad industry in international academe, with several biographies undertaken or written and the hunt for every possible scrap of extant Conradiana under way. This resulted in societies and journals dedicated to Conrad's life and works in the USA, Britain, France, and Poland, the first steps in the daunting but now completed collected letters of Conrad, and a stubbornly unassailable interpretation of Conrad's literary career, captured in the title of Thomas Moser's influential Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline (1957). The period between 1950-75 also saw groundbreaking work on Conrad by Polish scholar Zdzisaw Najder, and with the unprecedented attention given to his life and works by gifted international scholars, these years constitute a true golden age of Conrad criticism

Volcanoes, disaster, and evil in victory

A literary criticism of the book "Victory," written by Joseph Conrad is presented. It states that the language used in "Victory" draw upon dichotomies of good and evil. Furthermore, it also talks about Alfred Russel Wallace's 1869 book "The Malay Archipelago" which was one of the sources of "Victory.

Death by water : the rise and fall of Los Saltos del Guairá

Los Saltos del Guairá, known in English as the Guayra Falls, and in Portuguese as Sete Quedas (Seven Falls), were once the most powerful waterfalls on earth, regarded by those who saw them as “worthy of description by Homer and Virgil.” Located on the Paraná on the Brazil-Paraguay border and endowed over time with near-legendary status, the spectacular falls vanished in October 1982, submerged by rising river levels extending behind the vast reservoir created by the Itaipú Dam, a vast hydroelectric project developed by Brazil and Paraguay throughout the 1970s. Itaipú has been well documented, whereas the importance of los Saltos del Guairá in the literature and history of Latin America remains scantly documented outside of Paraguay and Brazil, thereby concealing one of the most drastic environmental transformations brought about by technological intervention. By examining the rich history of the falls as recorded by Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century, travellers and explorers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and politicians and engineers in the twentieth century, this article explores in detail the evolving place of los Saltos del Guairá in the literature and politics of the environment of Latin America and the circumstances leading to their final disappearance in 1982

'"Unfit for Action . . . Unable to Rest" : Goethe, Lermontov and Under Western Eyes

The influence of Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time on Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eye

Experimental investigation of effervescent atomization: Part I. Comparison of flat-end and streamlined aerator body designs

The present experimental work is concerned with the study of effervescent atomisation, a two-phase gas-liquid spray generation technique that offers many advantages over conventional atomisers. In this study we show the advantage of streamlined aerator design over flat-end aerator type with respect to formation of gas void in the aerator wake in the interior of an inside-out type of effervescent atomizer. The experiments are performed employing high-speed shadowgraphy visualizations. It is observed that in the conventional flat-end type of aerator design the formation of gas void is undesirable and leads to spray characterized by the instabilities, causing fluctuating spray properties. The existence of gas void also prevents the formation of bubbly flow inside the effervescent atomizer which is actually preferred in these type of atomizers to enable stable spray generation and fine atomization. The formation and existence of gas-void is found to be a result of aerator bluff body recirculation and gas phase buoyancy effects. Four different streamlined aerator designs with tips in the shape of circular arc, circular arc/conical hybrid, conical and DARPA SUBOFF afterbody design (which is common in the conventional ship designs) are evaluated to determine the best among them with respect to mitigating the unwanted gas-void in the interior of an effervescent atomizer. These are evaluated with respect to ability to produce bubbly flow over comparatively large operating range and the ability to impart minimum wake (of aerator body) effect. It is concluded upon careful experimental observations that DARPA SUBOFF afterbody design is the best among the streamlined aerator designs

Effect of Adjuvant Chemotherapy on Survival of Patients With Stage III Colon Cancer Diagnosed After Age 75 Years

Few patients 75 years of age and older participate in clinical trials, thus whether adjuvant chemotherapy for stage III colon cancer (CC) benefits this group is unknown

'Who's that Fellow Lynn': Conrad and Robert Lynd

While there may be a connection between Lynd's review and Conrad's treatment of Poland and nationality in A Personal Record, it is important to point out that writing on such subjects was not a dramatic departure for him. Nationality and national identity had already featured prominently in his writing. Allan H. Simmons (2006) has pointed out that Conrad was alert to concepts of Englishness, with The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' engaging with the connection between English maritime traditions and national identity. Nostromo presented a wondrously complex vision of a South American nation and the myriad claims to authentic or intangible national identities existing in any given state. In his November 1904 review of Nostromo in The Speaker, Edward Garnett argued that Conrad's novel presented 'a whole national drama' (Sherry, ed., 1973: 175). The Secret Agent ironically observed the activities of marginal, nationally diverse figures at the heart of the British Empire. With "Amy Foster," that novel constitutes Conrad's study of foreignness in English culture, an exposé of the "insular nature of Great Britain" (212). And, perhaps most clearly of all, 'Autocracy and War' (1905) reproduced the rhetoric of nineteenth-century Polish Messianism that had dominated the intellectual climate of Conrad's youth