Robert Hampson

Royal Holloway, University of London | RHUL · Department of English

The essay considers Sean Bonney's work in the period 2008-2014. It focuses on his PhD thesis on Amiri Baraka (completed in 2013) and the publications Baudelaire in English (2008) and Letters Against the Firmament (2015). The thesis explored tensions between aesthetic and political commitment in Baraka's work during the 1960s, a period of particular...

This is a collection of 29 essays edited by Robert Hampson and Veronique Pauly about the reception of Conrad in mainland Europe from the 1890s to the present day. The essays range (alphabetically) from Bulgaria to Ukraine. In a number of cases (such as France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Ukraine), there are two or more essays by different authors d...

The book consists of 19 experimental odes written during the covid lockdown(s), placing the pandemic within larger socio-historical contexts. The documentation of a particular period of our history - from stripped supermarket shelves through to events in the White House, from PPE shortages to plans to colonise Mars - is presented through a linked s...

This is a critical biography of Joseph Conrad that traces his life from his childhood in a Russian penal colony through his early manhood in Marseille and his years in the British Merchant Navy to his career as a novelist. It describes how these experiences influenced Conrad's early fiction from his early Malay novels through to Heart of Darkness';...

This volume is a collection of essays by various experts designed to cover the range of Allen Fisher's work in poetry, performance and visual art - from Redell Olsen on Fisher's relation to Fluxus in the 1960s and 1970s through Will Rowe on Fisher's first large-scale project Place and Will Montgomery on the responses to Brixton of Allen Fisher and...

2017 was declared ‘The Year of Joseph Conrad’ in Poland, and this led to various events in his honour across Europe. Among these events was the ‘Conrad Project’ in the Netherlands, which culminated in Izabela Pacholec’s radical adaptation of The Secret Agent. Robert Hampson gave a skype lecture at the start of the ‘Conrad Project’ which influenced...

This article is situated in my own work in poetry. It falls into two parts: the first takes off from my own work to explore different practices of bordering; the second part continues that exploration by reference to recent work by Caroline Bergvall and Jeff Hilson. The first section explores my sequence, ‘the war against tourism’. These poems were...

The Cambridge History of the English Short Story is the first comprehensive volume to capture the literary history of the English short story. Charting the origins and generic evolution of the English short story to the present day, and written by international experts in the field, this book covers numerous transnational and historical connections...

Clasp is an exercise in collective remembering. It is edited by Robert Hampson and Ken Edwards and includes essays by over 20 contributors, recalling their engagement with the London innovative poetry scene of the 1970s. Contributors include Peter Barry, Paula Claire, Tony Lopez, David Miller, Frances Presley, Elaine Randell, Gavin Selerie and Iain...

This chapter juxtaposes the writings of two men whom we might think of as non-standard First World War combatants. Both were literary men; both were somewhat older than their fellow soldiers when they joined up: Frederic Manning was thirty-four when he enlisted as a private in the Shropshire Light Infantry in October 1915, and Ford Madox Ford was f...

This essay examines Conrad’s political essays written between 1905 and 1916. This examination involves three key terms—nationalism, internationalism and transnationalism—which will be explored and differentiated. First, there is the nineteenth-century nationalism that found expression in the unification of Germany in 1871 and the unification of Ita...

RH: Allen Fisher, your career as a poet is closely linked with London, where you were born and grew up, and integral to works such as Place and Brixton Fractals. Indeed, since the start of the 1970s you have been one of the most influential figures for successive generations of the “London School” of poets: you were included, along with Bob Cobbing...

Conrad's Secrets explores a range of knowledges which would have been familiar to Conrad and his original readers. Drawing on research into trade, policing, sexual and financial scandals, changing theories of trauma and contemporary war-crimes, the book provides contexts for Conrad's fictions and produces original readings of his work.

In the final chapter of The English Novel (1930), Ford Madox Ford suggests that “when the dust of The Yellow Book period died away” after the trial of Oscar Wilde, there nevertheless remained in the public mind “some conception that novel writing was an art” and that “the novel was a vehicle by means of which every kind of psychological or scientif...

The familiar narrative of Conrad's involvement with the United States focuses on his visit to the East Coast in May 1923 as part of the campaign by his American publisher Doubleday to publicize Chance and various cheap and expensive collected editions of Conrad's work. This campaign saw Conrad achieve popular success in the United States—a success...

In 1884, Henry James wrote his essay "The Art of Fiction" as an opportunistic response to Walter Besant's essay of the same title. Robert Louis Stevenson responded with "A Humble Remonstrance" and, when James replied, he responded again with a second essay, "A Gossip on Romance." Although James's "The Art of Fiction" is the best known of these essa...

The Introduction covers the publication history of the sonnet sequence by Tony Lopez; it discusses their engagement with the public language of the 1990s; it discusses Lopez's critical writing on British innovative poetry to provide an approach to Lopez's own work; it discusses Lopez's sonnets in relation to Ted Berrigan's; it discusses the themati...

As noted in an earlier chapter, in his ‘Author’s Note’ to Chance, Conrad describes how, when he had reached an impasse in the writing of the novel, he ‘followed Captain Anthony’ and made Flora de Barral central to the narrative (C, viii). Flora’s story, as told by Marlow, is that of a woman traumatised by her mistreatment as a child. When her gover...

Early in ‘Heart of Darkness’, Marlow recounts his job interview in ‘the sepulchral city’.2 The interview concludes with him signing ‘some documents’, and he observes: ‘I believe I undertook amongst other things not to disclose any trade secrets. Well, I’m not going to’ (HoD, 56). Towards the end of his narrative, Marlow returns to this topic: after...

In the opening chapter of The Secret Agent, Conrad introduces us to the Verloc household, at the heart of the empire on which the sun never sets, ‘hidden in the shades of the sordid street seldom touched by the sun, behind the dim shop with its wares of disreputable rubbish’.2 The shop’s double front – with rubber stamps and bottles of marking ink...

Part III, Chapter 4 of Victory ends as follows: Before she could make a movement, or even turn her head his way, he took her in his arms and kissed her lips. He tasted on them the bitterness of a tear fallen there. He had never seen her cry. It was like another appeal to his tenderness – a new seduction. The girl glanced round, moved suddenly away,...

Gun-running is a recurrent motif across the range of Conrad’s writings. His early story ‘Karain: A Memory’ (1897), for example, is framed by and revolves around the illicit trade in weapons. It begins with the unnamed narrator reading a newspaper in London. The newspaper’s reference to ‘native risings in the Eastern Archipelago’ reminds him of earl...

The second chapter of The Secret Agent economically establishes Victorian London as a city of sharp contrasts of wealth and poverty. At the start of Chapter 2 Verloc walks through the West End of London on his way to the Russian embassy. His route takes him past Hyde Park: Through the park railings these glances beheld men and women riding in the R...

From December 1907 to January 1910, Conrad worked on what he described as his ‘most deeply meditated novel’ (CL5, 695), Under Western Eyes. This was his only large-scale fictional engagement with Eastern Europe, with the world of his childhood, and the strain of this encounter is suggested by the psychological breakdown which followed his completio...

On 7 September 1916, Conrad had announced to Macdonald Hastings that he had ‘taken up some work for the Admiralty’ and would be ‘flying about the country for the next fortnight’ (CL5, 658).1 He began his war service on Thursday 14 September in Lowestoft. He travelled there via London, where he had dinner, the evening before, with Jane Anderson.2 He...

'Fin de siécle', murmured Lord Henry with languid anticipation in the 1891 version of Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde's novel first appeared in Lippincott's Magazine in June 1890. Six months later, the same headlining position was occupied by the periodical version of Kipling's 'The Light That Failed'. That version and the fir...

This article examines the history of innovations in modernist poetry. It suggests that the history of modernist poetry is one of radical innovation in form, prosody, and language, and that it is an ongoing tradition which is still vibrant in the twenty-first century, with successive generations of poets consciously writing within it. The article di...

Joseph Conrad, the pen-name adopted by Józef Konrad Korzeniowski (1857-1924), earned his early reputation as a writer of colonial fiction. His first two novels, Almayer's Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896), were set in Southeast Asia, and reviewers saw him as annexing a new territory for British fiction. They compared his work, for e...

This second installment of Conradiana's triple issue on Joseph Conrad and serialization focuses on the first decade of the twentieth century as the author, having made his name with the Savoy, Cornhill Magazine, New Review, Illustrated London News, and Blackwood's Magazine, struggled to convert literary prestige into coin. With substantial book sal...

In this final installment of Conradiana's volume on Conrad and serialization, the focus falls on the period 1908 to 1918, from the founding of the English Review to the serial publication of The Shadow-Line and "The Tale." This was the period of Conrad's fullest involvement with mass-market periodicals. The second installment showed how, during the...

In "Geography and Some Explorers," Joseph Conrad produces a series of vignettes of Mungo Park, David Livingstone, and Dr. Barth. Park, for example, means for him "the vision of a young, emaciated, fair- haired man, clad simply in a tattered shirt and worn- out breeches, gasping painfully for breath and lying on the ground in the shade of an enormou...

MFS Modern Fiction Studies 51.1 (2005) 218-221 In his essay "Geography and Some Explorers," Joseph Conrad famously outlines three phases of European geography in terms of cartography and exploration. First there was the "fabulous phase" of medieval cartography, the phase of "circumstantially extravagant speculation" (Last Essays 4, 30), where the b...

This essay examines Thackeray's travel-writing through close attention to his book "Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Cairo" (1846). It approaches it through Thackeray's other extended piece of travel-writing, "The Irish Sketch Book" (1843), and through W. A. Kinglake's "Eothen" (1844), which Thackeray read during his journey to Cairo. The essay...

Hugh Clifford arrived in Malaya in 1883 as a junior cadet in the Perak Civil Service, and served as private secretary to Hugh Low, Resident in Perak.1 In 1887, Clifford was appointed the first British Consular Agent in Pahang. In 1895, at the very early age of thirty, he was appointed Resident of Pahang, where he remained until 1902, when he return...

The characteristics of the world of the Malay archipelago as represented in Conrad’s first Malay novels, Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, are commerce, mobility, and cultural diversity. It is a world of nomads and travellers, traders and conspirators, adventurers and pirates.1 The novels foreground the material conditions of trade and...

At the centre of Almayer’s Folly is the search for identity of Nina, the child of a Dutch father and an Asian mother. In a world which is represented as polarised along racial lines, Nina chooses her mother’s tradition, rather than her father’s, and this decision is apparently fixed by her choice of Dain, a ‘Malay chief’ (AF, 64) from Bali, as her...

It is tempting to begin with a chronological mapping of the region. A general survey might register the Indian influence beginning around the fifth century; subsequent Chinese influence; the impact of Islam from the ninth century; and contact with Europe from around 1500 marked by successive attempts by various European countries to dominate the sp...

Said, discussing the interplay between writing, speaking and seeing in Conrad’s fiction, has suggested that, characteristically, Conrad’s narratives ‘orginate in the hearing and telling presence of people’ (95).1 But these narratives also often assume (as Chapter 6 has demonstrated) the currency of rival versions and, indeed, are often positioned a...

GoGwilt has suggested that, despite his career-long engagement with the Malay Archipelago, ‘the full importance of that historical setting’ seemed increasingly to elude Conrad (IW, 69). Thus, for example, Almayer’s Folly presents a Sambir dependent ‘on a whole set of contingent economic and political interests’ (IW, 84); it gives a sense of ‘Malay...

If Conrad was ‘annexing’ Borneo for English literature, he was also writing in the context of a textual tradition relating to Malaysia. Conrad’s first novels derive from his own experiences in the region and the stories that he heard there. They attempt to represent the place and its peoples in terms of a common humanity. This attempt ends, in ‘Kar...

It is now generally accepted that Conrad structures the narrative of Lord Jim by reference to light literature: in the first part of the novel, he produces a counter-version of the sea-life of romance; in the second part of the novel, in Patusan, he re-creates the colonial world of adventure romance.1 Jim constructs his identity from ‘a course of l...

While Marco Polo seems to have been the first European to visit and write of the archipelago, the historiography of the area in English begins with William Marsden’s The History of Sumatra (1783).1 As Bastin notes, this was not the first work about the region to be published in English, but it was ‘the first detailed account of Sumatra’ to appear i...

Conrad and Richard Curie first met in November 1912. Curie had written an appreciative article on Conrad (mainly about Nostromo) for the November 1912 issue of the magazine Rhythm, which Edward Garnett had shown to Conrad. The two men subsequently met at one of Garnett’s regular Tuesday lunches at the Mont Blanc restaurant in Soho, and shortly afte...

When Ezra Pound arrived in London in August/September 1908, Ford Madox Hueffer was already an established figure in the capital’s literary life. He had published four volumes of poetry, nine novels (including two in collaboration with Joseph Conrad), as well as children’s fiction, ‘sociological impressionism’, art history and biography. Ford’s care...

Lingard’s role in An Outcast of the Islands anticipates the creation of Marlow-as-narrator in ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Lord Jim: his struggle to understand and ‘make sense’ of Willems’s actions provides a model for a narrative method which involves the reader through the narrator’s questioning and allows the narrator to question his own values.1 Con...

In A Personal Record (1912), Conrad sets out to describe the beginnings of the two major phases of his life: his initiation to the sea and his initiation to the life of a writer. The narrative begins in the winter of 1893–4 with Conrad writing the tenth chapter of Almayer’s Folly, while land-locked in Rouen aboard the ‘Adowa’, which was to be his l...

In Under Western Eyes, Conrad deals again with the world of anarchists and revolutionaries that he had touched upon in The Secret Agent, but, now he starts from the explicit premiss that acts of terrorism can be seen as a desperate response to an oppressive society.1 Haldin’s successful assassination attempt is described as ‘characteristic of the m...

In The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, Conrad had developed a model of society, that was presented through one particular small society: the crew of a ship. In ‘Heart of Darkness’, Conrad had held in painful tension the ideal code of the sea and what he felt to be the terrifying potentialities of human nature. In Lord Jim, that ideal code and the solida...

In his ‘personal remembrance’ of Conrad, Ford suggested how Conrad’s boyhood reading of Marryat’s novels about ‘the frigate warfare of Napoleonic times’ had shaped his response to his own career in the merchant navy: In the seventies and eighties of last century Conrad by dint of experience found in that service…the tradition of Marryat’s frigates....

An Outcast of the Islands is concerned, like The Secret Sharer, with ‘that ideal conception of one’s own personality every man sets up for himself secretly’, but it begins when the ideal has already been once betrayed: When he stepped off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar honesty, it was with an inward assertion of unflinching resolve to...

The seeds of the positive vision of Conrad’s late novels are present in Nostromo in the figure of Mrs Gould.1 The narrator observes of her: The wisdom of the heart having no concern with the erection or the demolition of theories any more than with the defence of prejudices, has no random words at its command. The words it pronounces have the value...

Until comparatively recently, there were only two critical approaches to Conrad’s late novels. On the one hand, there was the view established by Hewitt, Moser and Guerard that Conrad’s late novels represented a decline after the achievement of the novels of his ‘major’ period: Lord Jim, Nostromo and The Secret Agent.1 On the other hand, there was...

Acknowledgments - Two Prototypes of Betrayal: Almayer's Folly - The Unshared Ideal of Self: An Outcast of the Islands - The Real Existence of Passions: The Sisters, 'The Rescuer' - The Brotherhood of the Sea: The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', 'Heart of Darkness', Lord Jim - The Betrayal of Land-Entanglements: Nostromo, The Secret Agent - Independence...

On 19 October 1900, H. G. Wells wrote to George Gissing describing the voyage made by his copy of the Fortnightly Review: “Popham that good man next door gets the Fortnightly from me and after that Joseph Conrad bears it off and then it goes to Hick.” 1 The issues for October and November 1900 carried a two-part essay by Frazer, “The Saturnalia and...

In The Pleasures of the Text Roland Barthes discusses literature in terms of ‘a dialectics of desire’ between the text and the reader.1 He draws on this idea to make a distinction between what he calls the ‘text of pleasure’ and what he calls the ‘text of bliss’: Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes...

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Cedric Watts begins his extremely valuable book on Heart of Darkness with a short account of the convention of the tale-within-a-tale.1 He notes that the history of the format ‘can be traced back via The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron to The Odyssey and The Iliad’ (p. 22). He suggests that the ‘abundance of shorter narratives’ (p. 22) using thi...

PrioleauElizabeth Stevens, The Circle of Eros: Sexuality in the Work of William Dean Howells (Durham,: Duke University Press, 1983, £23.40). Pp. xvii, 226. ISBN 8223 0429 9. - Volume 20 Issue 1 - R. G. Hampson