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The Secret Agent de Joseph Conrad

The Secret Agent

Autor Joseph Conrad
en Limba Engleză Hardback – 6 iun 2019
Set in London in 1886, the novel follows the life of Adolf Verloc, a secret agent. Verloc is also a businessman who owns a shop which sells pornographic material, contraceptives and bric-a-brac. He lives with his wife Winnie, his mother-in-law, and his brother-in-law, Stevie. Stevie has a mental disability, possibly autism, which causes him to be excitable; his sister, Verloc's wife, attends to him, treating him more as a son than as a brother. Verloc's friends are a group of anarchists of which Comrade Ossipon, Michaelis, and "The Professor" are the most prominent. Although largely ineffectual as terrorists, their actions are known to the police. The group produces anarchist literature in the form of pamphlets entitled F.P., an acronym for The Future of the Proletariat. Writing near the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew, among other things, on his native Poland's national experiences and on his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world-including imperialism and colonialism-and that profoundly explore the human psyche.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9781950330324
ISBN-10: 195033032X
Pagini: 256
Dimensiuni: 157 x 235 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.54 kg
Editura: Ancient Wisdom Publications

Notă biografică

Joseph Conrad (1857 - 1924) was a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. He joined the British merchant marine in 1878, and was granted British citizenship in 1886. Though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he was a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an impassive, inscrutable universe. Conrad is considered an early modernist, though his works still contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced numerous authors and many films have been adapted from, or inspired by, his works. Writing in the heyday of the British Empire, Conrad drew on his native Poland's national experiences and his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world-including imperialism and colonialism-and that profoundly explore the human psyche.

Descriere

Descriere de la o altă ediție sau format:
'Madness and despair! Give me that for a lever, and I'll move the world' In the only novel Conrad set in London, The Secret Agent communicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. The story is woven around an attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1894 masterminded by Verloc, a Russian spy working for the police, and ostensibly a member of an anarchist group in Soho. His masters instruct him to discredit the anarchists in a humiliating fashion, and when his evil plan goes horribly awry, Verlac must deal with the repercussions of his actions. The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction written in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels, to the beginning of the First World War.

Recenzii

The Secret Agent is set in the seedy world of Adolf Verloc, a storekeeper and double agent in late-Victorian London who pretends to sympathize with a group of international anarchists but reports on their activities to both the Russian embassy and the British government. As he is drawn further into a terrorist bombing plot, his family also becomes involved, with devastating consequences. Based on a real-life failed anarchist plot, The Secret Agent is both intimately engaged with its historical moment and profoundly relevant today.
This new Broadview Edition helps to recreate the historical context that informed Conrad’s preoccupations with global terrorism, human degeneration, the relativity of time, and the position of women.

“Tanya Agathocleous’s edition of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, a tale of espionage in the age of ennui, is an excellent, important, and timely addition to the Broadview list. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the novel uncannily speaks to a range of concerns that continue to preoccupy us—metropolitanism and cosmopolitanism, political terror, degeneracy and the “ends” of history, the collapse of boundaries between domestic and public life, the State’s intrusion into the lives of its citizens—issues that insist on a deep and careful understanding of their historical antecedents. Professor Agathocleous has judiciously selected materials from Conrad’s moment that will effectively immerse students in the social, political, and intellectual milieu of Conrad’s novel.” — Joseph McLaughlin, Ohio University
“An outstanding edition. First-time readers will welcome the eloquent introductory essay, which places The Secret Agent in the context of both Victorianism and modernism, as well as the very useful supplementary materials on anarchism and degeneration. And those already familiar with the novel will be prompted to re-read it in light of Agathocleous’s claim that Conrad, along with his New Woman contemporaries, is exploring marriage and the condition of women as well.” — Amanda Claybaugh, Columbia University

Cuprins

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Joseph Conrad: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
Author’s Note
The Secret Agent
Appendix A: London
  1. From Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853)
  2. From Ford Madox Hueffer, The Soul of London: A Survey of a Modern City (1905)
Appendix B: Anarchism and Terrorism
  1. From The Times (16 February 1894)
  2. From Isabel Meredith, A Girl Among the Anarchists (1903)
  3. From Joseph Conrad, a letter to R.B. Cunninghame Graham (20 December 1897)
  4. From Joseph Conrad, a letter to R.B. Cunninghame Graham (7 October 1907)
  5. From Peter Kropotkin, “Anarchism,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910)
  6. Peter Kropotkin, “The Scientific Bases of Anarchy” (1887)
  7. From Report of the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration (1903)
  8. From The Saturday Review (9 June 1906)
Appendix C: Degeneration
  1. From Charles Darwin, Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal (1872)
  2. From E. Ray Lankester, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (1880)
  3. From Cesare Lombroso, “Illustrative Studies in Criminal Anthropology: The Physiognomy of the Anarchists” (1890)
  4. From Max Nordau, Degeneration (1892)
Appendix D: Heat Death, Entropy, and Time
  1. From William Thomson, “On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy” (1852)
  2. From William Thomson, “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat” (1862)
  3. From Algernon Charles Swinburne, “The Garden of Proserpine” (1866)
  4. From Balfour Stewart and J. Norman Lockyer, “The Sun as a Type of the Material Universe” (1868)
Appendix E: Marriage and Feminism
  1. From Coventry Patmore, “The Angel in the House” (1863)
  2. From John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (1865)
  3. From Mona Caird, “Marriage” (1888)
  4. From Sarah Grand, “The New Aspect of the Woman Question” (1894)
  5. From Hugh E.M. Stutfield, “The Psychology of Feminism” (1897)
Appendix F: Contemporary Reviews
  1. Country Life (21 September 1907)
  2. E.V. Lucas, Times Literary Supplement (20 September 1907)
  3. New York Times Book Review (21 September 1907)
  4. Edward Garnett, The Nation (26 September 1907)
  5. William Morton Payne, The Dial (16 October 1907)
  6. Glasgow News (3 October 1907)
  7. John Galsworthy, Fortnightly Review (1 April 1908)
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