When Joseph Conrad’s novel Chance appeared in serial form in the New York Herald in 1912 and in book form in 1914 it established the author’s financial security for the first time. Following years of struggle to reach a wide audience for his fiction, Conrad benefitted from the American marketing of this novel for the women readers of romance. Aggressive advertising promoted the writer’s new focus on a female protagonist and Conrad’s division of the story’s location between land and sea. The novel proved popular and lucrative. Yet in spite of its economic success, Chance remains one of Conrad’s less well-known narratives. This fresh new collection of essays from both young and established scholars opens up a lively critical debate taking Chance beyond the status of best-selling romance. In a striking re-evaluation of the novel these writers examine Chance’s innovative narrative strategies, its up-to-the-minute commentary on female politics, contemporary ethics, as well as its antecedents in classical debate and the significance of Conrad’s last use of his seaman narrator Marlow.
“The shore gang”: Chance and the Ethics of Work
Andrew Glazzard
Rortyian Contingency and Ethnocentrism in Chance
Jay Parker
Speech, Affect, and Intervention in Chance
Anne Enderwitz
Marlow, Socrates, and an Ancient Quarrel in Chance
Debra Romanick Baldwin
Chance and Its Intertextualities
Ewa Kujawska-Lis
The “girl-novel”: Chance and Woolf’s The Voyage Out
E. H. Wright
“Fine-weather books”: Representations of Readers and Reading in Chance
Helen Chambers
From Incapable “Angel in the House” to Invincible “New Woman” in Marlovian Narratives:
Representing Womanhood in “Heart of Darkness” and Chance
Pei-Wen Clio Kao
“Let that Marlow talk”: Chance and the Narrative Problem of Marlow
John G. Peters
Chance: Conrad’s A Portrait of a Feminist
Yumiko Iwashimizu
Ships in the Night: Intimacy, Narration, and the Endless Near Misses of Chance
Mark Deggan
Contributors
Readers of modernist literature, researchers of Joseph Conrad, the romance novel and early feminism.