Born into a Polish szlachta (noble) family, the extraordinary modern novelist Joseph Conrad maintained, even in exile, strong ties to his Polish heritage and culture. Yet the author earned renown by writing in English, often about nautical adventures in remote parts of the world. In Joseph Conrad's Polish Soul, G. W. Stephen Brodsky seeks to reclaim the essentially Polish sensibility of Conrad's groundbreaking oeuvre. He finds in Conrad's work a distinct Polonism that plays intriguingly with selfhood, freedom, and irony. For Brodsky, Conrad's outlook and writing betray numerous...

Joseph Conrad and the Voicing of Textuality offers an original approach to Conrad's work rooted in linguistics and psychoanalytic theory. Claude Maisonnat provides fresh insight into the poetics of textuality by introducing the concept of textual voice, as opposed to the traditional conceptions of authorial voice and narrative voice. Understood as the main vector of poeticity in a text, textual voice is an offshoot of the Lacanian object-voice trimmed to fit a literary context. It enables the reader to uncover deeply concealed motivations and perceive unsuspected connections to the...