Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition

Nineteenth-century adventure fiction relating to the British empire served to promote, celebrate, and justify the imperial project, asserting the essential and privileging difference between us and them, colonizer and colonized. Andrea White’s study examines popular travel literature in relation to later adventure stories, and sets the fiction of Joseph Conrad in this context, showing how Conrad demythologized the imperial subject constructed in earlier writing. She argues that the very complexity of Conrad’s work provided an alternative, more critical means of evaluating the experience of empire.