Title: Romanticism, the Self, and the City: The Secret Agent in Literary History
Abstract: The dilemma that continues to pose for literary history emerges in the juxtaposition of statements by two of his best critics. Ian Watt moves from a close analysis of the Preface to The Nigger of the IVarcissus to generalize: Conrad represents the same central tradition of Romanticism of which is perhaps the most representative figure. Both men were by nature antipathetic to the more extreme forms of romantic individualism; and Conrad's theory in the Preface implicitly denies the basic division between the artist and the general public which such writers as Byron, Baudelaire, or later the Symbolists and Decadents, had made essential to their theory and practice.' In contrast Edward W. Said prefaces his survey of Conrad's oeuvre by announcing that the irony he finds in Conrad's writing a crucial place in the history of the duplicity of language which since Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud has made the study of the orders of language so focal.2 The line seems clearly drawn between the Modernist and the Romantic; Said's ironical and the of Watt and his follower David Thorburn, who sees Conrad's decisive allegiances with the century of Wordsworth especially in a passage from the Preface that emphasizes the . . . Romantic virtue of sincerity.3 Yet the virtues that
Publication Year: 1980
Publication Date: 1980-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 7
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