Kate O'Brien and the Fiction of Identity: Sex, Art and Politics in Mary Lavelle and Other Writings
The Rescue explores the uses of theatrical metaphors to signal moments of nonrecognition in the exotic and romantic setting of Lingard’s Malay Archipelago. The final chapter, on The Rover, argues that the romantic characters are left to haunt an isolated, post-romantic world; Peyrol’s death, however, ensures that romance will reappear in material and narrative form to those left behind. The title of the study derives from Conrad’s claim that The Rescue is “the swan song of romance”. The suggestion is that there is no more to be said on the subject. Baxter questions this assumption, demonstrating that romance will endure because it doubts its own death. Conrad’s fiction reveals its limitations and even its own disintegration. Fiction, like mankind, is vulnerable because it has a precarious hold on life. It is only in The Rover that narrative can be seen as a consolatory action. In the absence of the hero, heroism emerges. There is consolation in the reconstruction of a past that is lost to us. While the renewal of romantic narrative can never bring back that lost past, it demonstrates the arbitrariness of the present. Based on wide reading and an acute sense of cultural history, Joseph Conrad and the Swan Song of Romance offers many original interpretations of Conrad’s works and a new appreciation of the ways in which he continued to experiment, even in his later fiction.
These Irish Investments: Money as an Organizing Principle in As Music and Splendour (1958)
Since Kate O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour (1958) follows the careers of two Irish opera singers in the 1880s as they travel from Paris to Rome, to Milan, to Florence and Naples and beyond, it is ...
Mutiny Echoes: India, Britons, and Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities
This essay asks what, if any, import the Indian ““Mutiny”” of 1857 had on A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Charles Dickens�s fictionalized account of the French Revolution. Begun shortly after the Indian uprising started, Dickens�s historical novel appears studiously to avoid any mention of events on the Indian subcontinent, even though these events preoccupied and enraged the author. Few scholars have attended to the question of A Tale of Two Cities and the ““Mutiny,”” but when they have, scholars have looked for analogies between India and Dickens�s account of the French Revolution. In this essay, by contrast, I examine A Tale of Two Cities in a larger context——of Britons9 response to the Uprising, of Dickens9s short stories and essays in Household Words in the years before the ““Mutiny”” and immediately after, of Dickens9s disenchantment with aspects of British culture, and of his need to articulate a national identity grounded in action. I argue that the events in India were the match that ignited Dickens9s already established midcentury interests in national identity, nobility, and masculine heroism. I do not wish to suggest that A Tale of Two Cities is an Indian ““Mutiny”” novel, but rather that it is a novel about the ““Making of Britons,”” an important endeavor for an author who was intensely dissatisfied with the Britain that he saw around him.