Joseph Conrad's Readers

The familiar narrative of Conrad's involvement with the United States focuses on his visit to the East Coast in May 1923 as part of the campaign by his American publisher Doubleday to publicize Chance and various cheap and expensive collected editions of Conrad's work. This campaign saw Conrad achieve popular success in the United States—a success that then flowed back to Britain. This familiar narrative also includes Willa Cather's abortive attempt, in 1909, to interview Conrad for McClure's Magazine; F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ring Lardner dancing on Doubleday's lawn in 1923 in homage to Conrad; and William Faulkner's 1950 Nobel Prize speech (with its debt to Conrad's 1904 essay on Henry James). Peter Mallios's new book, which is a major event in both Conrad studies and American studies, shows that this is very much a cisatlantic view of the subject. Mallios shows not only the importance of Conrad's American reception—all of Conrad's novels, from Chance onwards, were best-sellers (and, as Stephen Donovan's Conrad First website shows, Conrad's work was also very widely syndicated in popular journals and local newspapers across the United States)—but that Conrad also figured significantly in American debates about national identity, race and gender, and the political identity of the South through often competing constructions of "Conrad."

Our Conrad addresses the twentieth-century North American invention of Conrad as "a 'master' literary figure" (5). However, it offers more than just a study of the reception of Conrad's work in North America, showing how various American writers used Conrad to negotiate "the relationship between Americanness and larger global developments" (5) and how writers of the American South, in particular, used Conrad to explore their own particular issues of identity. To develop this argument, Mallios foregrounds "the distinct heterotopic nature" of Conrad's fiction (6) and how various constructions of "Conrad" and divergent (and contradictory) readings of his work function as heterotopic spaces for a range of North American writers. Our Conrad is divided into three parts, representing "the three major spatial economies" of Conrad's American production: an initial "national" economy centered in the North East and arising from American debates about involvement in the First World War; an "international" expatriate economy arising in the aftermath of the war; and a Southern "regional" economy emerging in the 1920s (7). The principle figure in the first section is H. L. Mencken, who introduced Conrad into American literary discourse as an "object and agency of dissensus, disruption, and controversy" (7). For Mencken, Conrad's ambiguous relation to "Englishness" becomes a means of attacking American "Anglo-Saxon" international policies and domestic racial policies. In part two, Mallios considers how different constructions of "Conrad" were used by expatriate writers such as T. S. Eliot, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald to articulate different formulations of nationhood enabled by their own expatriate displacement. Part three explores Conrad's post-war reception in the South through attention to the little magazines, writings of the Fugitives and the Agrarians, and, above all, through close readings of Faulkner's engagement with Conrad.

Mallios's heterotopic approach also opens the door to what he calls "a new transnational comparative emphasis" in American studies (3). He challenges the "primarily nationalizing frames" through which canonical American writers have been addressed and reinforces the "post-Americanist" turn in North American cultural studies by showing how a range of North American writers participate in their own national cultural space heterotopically through another external perspective. By demonstrating the active presence of Conrad as a foreign literary figure in the field of North American cultural textuality, Mallios argues for the capillary influence of "foreign" cultural-discursive materials more generally within "even the most aggressively insular U...