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book Reviews The presumption to offer a medical diagnosis seems reckless in this situation, especially given Adams's own admission that such a diagnosis would be irresponsible without any direct evidence, though it certainly opens the way for a more scholarly analysis of possible psychoanalytic readings. Likewise, while the analyses of the texts offer no new ideas or arguments , they do provide a concise overview of Dowson's stories, forms, and contexts. Further, the vivid descriptions of 1890s London and the uncomplicated summaries of terms and texts make Madder Music, Stronger Wine the Dowson biography of choice for students and common readers. Despite its frequent melodrama, Adams's book offers some striking new historical material and a poignant story of a tragic artistic life. Especially interesting is the information about Adelaide Foltinowicz 's failed marriages and premature death after she and Dowson stopped seeing each other. Because of such inclusions, scholars, as well, will want to read it—ideally, alongside Longaker's earlier study. CHRISTINE ROTH University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh Conrad Within the Time-Space Continuum Con Coróneos. Space, Conrad, and Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. viii + 199 pp. $65.00 WHAT DISTINGUISHES Con Coróneos' Space, Conrad, and Modernity is panache, that incomparable blend of wit and chutzpah. Both serve him well in an ambitious undertaking whose declared subject is "the fall of space and its redemption." The first half of the book is concerned with the fall; the last half, with the redemption. Predictably the first part of the book is the more convincing. As Dante and Milton previously discovered, redemption is the harder case to make. Which is not to say that Coróneos does not present a clever and engaging (and highly readable!) argument. He does so in a format that fits the distinctly postmodern tone and emphasis of the book—in a series of brilliant intellectual riffs that soar like jazz solos, proceeding by association rather than logic, from John Buchan to Orson Welles, from seances to semiotics. In the course of these flights, Coróneos reclaims not only space but denigrated or neglected chunks of cultural history. As the author declares in his introduction, postmodern literature and criticism assign to space the priority that modernism formerly accorded to time. In the postmodern West, to be a subject is "to speak from, to, or in." And increasingly we are compelled to recognize the role that space 111 ELT 47 : 1 2004 plays in our cultural experience—in the advent of globalized commerce, in the forays of postcolonial nationalisms, in the experiences of virtual reality and hypertext, in the information deluge of the World Wide Web. Whither is the ascent of space leading us? And what, if anything, do we gain from its prominence? Alluringly, the spatialization of thought, intensified by the reinvigorated discipline of geography, offers us the "mirage of fullness" that Bergson once observed in time. More importantly, the intellectual dominance of space allows us to see the possibility of an art that can free us from the objective world, by putting a distance between us and things. Saussurean linguistics and its allied disciplines have enabled us to focus on the opposition between words and objects. But this insistent focus on space has its drawbacks as well: it produces vertigo, increases anxiety about the lack of a center, and intensifies horror of the void. Thus, space has become both "our limit and our emancipatory horizon." Concerned with space as limit, Part I of the book deals with the emergence of closed space towards the end of the nineteenth century, in a world exhaustively explored and fully mapped, its secrets disclosed, its discrete territories manifestly interconnected. Haunted by the medieval paradox about the nature of God as "the sphere of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere," this section of the book deals with the "cruel knowledge" of finitude (set against our unquenchable longing for the infinite). As Coróneos points out, in this world of Geography Triumphant (to use Conrad's term), exploration and adventure come to an end and therefore so must adventure fiction, to be supplanted by the spy novel, the fictional form that deals with...

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