Introduction

In his 1908 review of A Set of Six, Robert Lynd famously referred to Conrad as ‘a homeless person’, ‘without either country or language’. Lynd acknowledges that Conrad has tried to find ‘a new patriotism for himself in the sea’, but he claims that this attempt too is vitiated, since Conrad’s ‘vision of men’ is ‘the vision of a cosmopolitan’. At the time of Lynd’s review, Conrad had already recently faced a charge of betrayal of his national duty from Poland. In this Introduction, Conrad’s negotiation of his cultural and political affiliations is placed in the context of the literature of critical cosmopolitanism and the literature of transnationalism. The Introduction concludes with a survey of recent literature on Conrad and transnationalism.