Conrad & Popular Culture

BOOK REVIEWS tries to connect the readings to the rest of her narrative by describing the train journeys the poets took to see some of the paintings they wrote about (many of which were in continental galleries). She also hones in on the preface to the collection, in which the poets quote Flaubert 's aim of "transporting" ("II faut ...se transporter") his readers to his characters, and describe their own process of "translating] " painting into verse as akin to this (181-82). Vadillo calls this document a "Manifesto for the passenger," but while translation may involve a form of transport, as she argues, we are a long way from Levy's "Ballade of an Omnibus." The "passenger" here could be any reader of almost any work; all sense of the historical and urban context has disappeared. As a result, Vadillo's readings of the poems (in the context of the ekphrastic philosophies of Ruskin and Pater), while often interesting in and of themselves, feel like they belong in a different book. Although the structure of the book is wonderfully clear, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism sometimes reads like the work of a nonnative speaker. The prose, though attractively energetic, is also frequently ungrammatical or at least unconventional (consider, for example, the following: "Either as a prosthetic body or as a demonic master, travelling was undoubtedly modifying the connection that had existed between the urban dweller and London" [27]). Nevertheless, while uneven, Vadillo's book was in many respects a pleasure to read: it is full of interesting historical information, and it gives serious attention to poets who (while not altogether unrecovered) deserve more critical attention than they have yet been given. STEFANIE MARKOVITS ________________ Yale University Conrad Si Popular Culture Stephen Donovan. Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave , 2005. xiii + 236 pp. $74.95 THE LITERARY OVERTONES of Peter Jackson's recent blockbuster movie King Kong reveal the extent to which Joseph Conrad's work has become bound up with popular culture. Conrad not only informs the latest big-budget Hollywood offerings but his fiction represents the foundation of popular cult movies such as Apocalypse Now. Indeed, popular culture has had an inestimable effect on Conrad's reputation. In one sense the popularity of Heart of Darkness rests to some extent on that work's comparative brevity, which ensures that those accustomed to the ingenious distractions of television, computer games, advertising , and the internet can acquire a grounding in Conradian complexity 471 ELT 49 : 4 2006 in an easy-to-endure ninety pages or so. Conrad's writing has in fact become so lost in a popular culture context that some now feel it is not even necessary to read Conrad to experience his work: "Have you read Heart of Darkness?" "No, but I've seen Apocalypse Now." However, within the realm of contemporary literary studies, Conrad is still perceived as "an austere and humourless early Modernist," an author who kept aloof from popular culture. Stephen Donovan's excellent new study, which adds to previous works by Linda Dryden, Andrea White, and Susan Jones, all of which have relocated Conrad's work in a popular context, attempts to overturn this image, and explores the relationship between Conrad and the broad popular cultural world from which his work emerged. Donovan unveils the results of his wide-ranging cultural archaeology, presenting myriad examples of early-twentieth-century documents on visual entertainment, advertising, travel and tourism, and the popular fiction market, elaborating on their importance for Conrad's fiction. The study initially takes the reader into the diverse cultural whirlwind that was Conrad's era, giving each chapter what Conrad described as "the proper atmosphere of actuality." Donovan then, significantly, takes an approach to Conrad's oeuvre that largely avoids those works such as Heart of Darkness that have suffered from an oppressive amount of critical and popular analysis. Instead, Conrad's intriguing short fiction , such as "The Partner" and "An Anarchist," along with Chance, Lord Jim, and The Secret Agent form the focus of Donovan's literary criticism. The opening chapter on visual entertainment wonderfully captures Conrad's presence in late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century London : the London of...