Abstract: Despite the great interest shown recently in Joseph Conrad's fiction, there has appeared comparatively little comment relating the ideas on literary technique expressed by Ford Madox Ford in his several chapters on Conrad to the latter's own remarks in his letters, essays, and notes to his first Collected Edition. These remarks, when brought together and evaluated, go far to provide a basis for Conrad's literary intentions and suggest criteria by which to judge his early artistic successes as well as his later generally less successful work. They demonstrate almost conclusively that when Conrad forsook the theories he worked out with Ford and those expressed in his early letters and essays, especially in the now famous Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, his work became thin and uninteresting, losing the range and texture of his best fiction. They demonstrate further that when he wrote his Author's Notes, from which several critics have been tempted to derive his aesthetic, he was already shucking off many of the early ideas in favor of the very practices he had once repudiated. Conrad's notes were almost frivolous for a major novelist intent on the seriousness of his craft, and they were obviously conceived more to establish rapport with his newly-won popular audience than as a guide to his artistic intentions. If we want insight into the major Conrad, we must return to the critical comments thrown out when he was an apprentice writer still excited by the ideas he and Ford had agreed upon, a time almost twenty years before the debility set in which marked his last years of creative work and which carried over into the notes written during the same period. It should be mentioned that although this paper will make passing references to Conrad's development as a creative artist, such remarks will always be secondary to the main intention: to examine in detail his literary theory to determine upon what base he built his major works. Consequently, in this paper, I employ Conrad's novels merely to provide concrete examples for various aspects of his theory; a close
Publication Year: 1960
Publication Date: 1960-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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