Conrad's popular fictions

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 swindlers - in over a hundred Victorain 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 works to find new audiences - which he sought simultaneously to challenge and satisfy. -- from back cover.