Conrad II: A New Bibliography

ELT: Volume 34:2,1991 The Secret Agent created the genre of the psychological-political detective novel that had a profound influence on modern writers hke OrweU, Greene, Koestler, SUone, Sartre and le Carré. He had "a considerable understanding of conspiratorial pohtics," OrweU observed. "He had an often-expressed horror of Anarchists and Nihilists, but he also had a species of sympathy with them, because he was a Pole—a reactionary in home pohtics, perhaps, but a rebel against Russia and Germany." In January 1908 Conrad confessed to Galsworthy that the critical response and the modest sales had not hved up to his expectations: "The Secret Agent may be pronounced by now an honourable faUure. It brought me neither love nor promise of literary success. I own that I am cast down. I suppose I am a fool to have expected anything else. I suppose there is something in me that is unsympathetic to the general public. . . . Foreignness, I suppose." Jeffrey Meyers University of Colorado Conrad II: A New Bibliography Bruce Teets. Joseph Conrad. An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1990. xix + 786 pp. $75.00 BRUCE TEETS has brought to a conclusion a work begun almost thirty years ago with the late Helmut Gerber, the latter of whom perhaps did more than anyone in hterary studies in the United States to bring consciousness to the significance of Enghsh hterature in transition, 18801920 , by founding ELT, coordinating an annual series of seminars at the Modern Language Association before the MLA estabhshed its Late 19thand Early 20th-century Enghsh Literature division, and initiating and serving as general editor of the Northern Illinois University Annotated Secondary Bibliography Series. Teets and Gerber edited Joseph Conrad, the first volume in the ASB series, and it was subsequently selected for the Modern Language Association's Scholar's Library. Conrad I set the standard for subsequent titles in the series. Even though Teets's current volume includes no entries after 1975, and even though the fastidious user of the volume wiU find occasional typographical or other minor errors in the five indices and texts of the 2,151 new entries, supplementing the 1,976 annotated items in Conrad I, the world of Conrad 232 Book Reviews scholarship is grateful to Bruce Teets for persevering, in the face of great obstacles, and completing the task. Perhaps only a bibliographer can understand the problems confronting the compüer of a bibliography such as Conrad II, as Teets caUs the volume in his preface. In addition to the time-consuming, meticulous thoroughness required in the compiling of entries to be annotated, of locating scholars with time and motivation to contribute annotations in aU fourteen languages included in the text, and of finding even minimal funding to cover secretarial costs, interlibrary loan requests and necessary travel, Teets faced other, more project-threatening problems. First was the untimely death of Hal Gerber and the inevitable delays brought about by the restructuring of the editorial staff. Other problems and more delays multiplied: the inability despite trying for more than a decade to find scholars fluent in languages not included in Conrad II who could devote the time required to annotating items in those languages; the decision by Northern Illinois University Press to conclude its involvement with the ASB series; the search for a new publisher; and once one was found, making the inevitable changes that new editors with new formats required—not the least of which was shortening the length of many annotations to produce a volume both manageable in size and inexpensive enough (if one can call $75 inexpensive enough) to be within the financial means of most students of Conrad. In my view, the book is well worth the cost, representing as it does indispensable information compüed in more than a decade of work by at least twelve Conrad scholars, and certainly saving the user many hours of research. One of the stated aims of Conrad II is to add the entries excluded for various reasons from Conrad I, beginning in 1895, the date of pubhcation of Almayer's Folly, and concluding with 1966. Conrad II adds 762 items to those seventy-one years, most notably sixty-six of...