Conrad's Popular Fictions ― Secret Histories and Sensational Novels

Conrad's Popular Fictions examines the influence on Joseph Conrad's fiction of some of the most popular genres of late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain, such as detective and espionage fiction, the terrorist novel, and invasion-scare fiction. By exploring five character-types – detectives, informers, spymasters, terrorists, and swindlers – in over a hundred Victorian and Edwardian popular novels as well as in Conrad's works, it shows how Conrad experimented creatively with genres, deploying the themes and tropes of popular fiction to develop psychological and philosophical insights and achieve extraordinary aesthetic effects. By recovering forgotten contexts for Conrad's fictions, this book shows how Conrad's work as well as the period's popular fiction exploited topical, newsworthy events. It argues that Conrad was never simply a highbrow writer, but used genre in different ways in different works to find new audiences – which he sought simultaneously to challenge and satisfy.

Andrew Glazzard is a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and a visiting lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. As well as writing on Conrad, he has written on Arnold Bennett, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H.G. Wells.