Berthoud Jacques - Nostromo: a tale of the seaboard

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

JOSEPH CONRAD was born Jzef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in the Russian part of Poland in 1857. His parents were punished by the Russians for their Polish nationalist activities and both died while Conrad was still a child. In 1874 he left Poland for France and in 1878 began a career with the British merchant navy. He spent nearly twenty years as a sailor and did not begin writing novels until he was approaching forty. He became a British citizen in 1886 and settled permanently in England after his marriage to Jessie George in 1896.

Conrad is a writer of extreme subtlety and sophistication; works such as Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Nostromo display technical complexities which have established him as one of the first English Modernists. He is also noted for the unprecedented vividness with which he communicates a pessimists view of mans personal and social destiny in such works as The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, and Victory. Despite the immediate critical recognition that they received in his lifetime Conrads major novels did not sell, and he lived in relative poverty until the commercial success of Chance (1913) secured for him a wider public and an assured income. In 1923 he visited America, with great acclaim, and he was offered a knighthood (which he declined) shortly before his death in 1924. Since then his reputation has steadily grown, and he is now seen as a writer who revolutionized the English novel and was arguably the most important single innovator of the twentieth century.

JACQUES BERTHOUD is Emeritus Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York. He is the author of Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase (1978) and of many essays on Conrad, and editor of four of his novels, including Lord Jim for Oxford Worlds Classics.

MARA KALNINS is the General Editor of the works of Joseph Conrad in the Oxford Worlds Classics series. She is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and Reader in Modern English Literature at the University of Cambridge.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

JOSEPH CONRAD

A Tale of the Seaboard

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
JACQUES BERTHOUD and MARA KALNINS

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General Editors Preface, Select Bibliography, Chronology of
Joseph Conrad Mara Kalnins 2002

Other editorial matter Jacques Berthoud and Mara Kalnins 2007

The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1984
New edition 2007

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Conrad, Joseph, 18571924.

Nostromo: a tale of the seaboard/Joseph Conrad; edited with an
introduction and notes by Jacques Berthoud and Mara Kalnins. New ed.

p. cm. (Oxford worlds classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 9780192801548 (alk. paper)
1. Revolutions Fiction. 2. Sailors Fiction. 3. Latin America Fiction.
4. Political fiction. I. Berthoud, Jacques A. II. Kalnins, Mara. III. Title.
PR6005.04N578 2007 823.912dc22 2007007838

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ISBN 9780192801548

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Conrad is acknowledged as one of the great writers of the twentieth century, but neither in his lifetime nor after have his works been available in authoritative texts. This was partly because Conrad himself revised his writings at several stages (in manuscript, typescript, and proofs), partly because many of his works appeared in different versions (slightly so in the English and American editions, significantly so in serial and book form), and partly because he himself continued to revise them for subsequent publication. Moreover he was involved in still further revision of the texts when his works were issued in the collected editions of Doubleday and Heinemann in 1921, though the extent of his involvement varied considerably from work to work. Like many authors, he also suffered from the well-meant, but often misguided, editorial efforts of his publishers who not only imposed their own house styling but sometimes changed his grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and even altered whole phrases. The textual history of Conrads worksthe revisions they underwent and their transmission and publicationis therefore an intricate and complicated one. A scholarly edition of the Letters and Works is currently being prepared by Cambridge University Press and eight volumes of the Letters as well as two novels have been published to date.