Imperialist Colonialism and the Received Canon

The sightings of Conrad in Chap. 2 of Intimations locate him in his time—imperialism’s fin de siècle, the onset of modernism in the visual and performing arts and literature, and yet, the narrowly English received canon still firmly in place (with grudging acceptance of American and other British authors). We sight Heart of Darkness in Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, John Le Carré’s The Mission Song, Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes, and Ronan Bennett’s The Catastrophist. Jan Morris’s Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere castigates with subtle wit notions of empire and nationalism with fictive presences of Conrad; and Charles Osgood’s The Voice of England, and Albert Baugh et al.’s A Literary History of England in which Conrad is barely to be glimpsed, manifest the imperial literary myopia Conrad’s reputation has weathered.