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 ...
The rise of supernatural fiction, 1762-1800
List of illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction Part I. Techniques of Ghost-Seeing: 1. The case of the Cock Lane ghost 2. Producing enthusiastic terror Part II. The Business of Romance: 3. The advantages of history 4. Back to the future 5. The value of the supernatural in a commercial society Part III. The Strange Luxury of Artificial Terror: 6. Women, luxury and the sublime 7. The supernatural explained 8. Like a heroine Part IV. Magico-Political Tales: 9. The terrorist system 10. Conspiracy, subversion, supernaturalism Afterword Notes Bibliography Index.