Victory: An Island Tale

Description

Published in 1915, Victory: An Island Tale holds a special place in Conrad's later writings as a bold experiment in genre. The novel variously draws upon realism, allegory and melodrama to explore large themes: commitment and solidarity, the individual's relationship to society and the power of love. The Introduction situates the novel in Conrad's career and traces its sources and contemporary reception. The essay on the text and the apparatus lay out the history of the work's composition and publication, and detail the extensive interventions by Conrad's typists, compositors and editors. Also included are notes explaining literary and historical references, a glossary of nautical terms, illustrations including pictures of early drafts, and appendixes. Established through modern textual scholarship, this edition of Victory presents the novel in a form more authoritative than any so far printed, and restores a text that has circulated in highly defective forms since its original publication.

J. H. Stape is Senior Research Fellow at St Mary's University, Twickenham, London, and has taught at universities in England, Canada, France and the Far East. The author of The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (2007) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and The New Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (Cambridge University Press, 2014), he has edited and co-edited several volumes for The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad. He has also published on E. M. Forster, William Golding, Thomas Hardy, Frank Harris, Angus Wilson and Virginia Woolf. Alexandre Fachard, Charge de cours at the Universites de Lausanne and de Geneve, teaches English literature. He has edited Within the Tides (Cambridge University Press, 2012) for The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad and has written for The Conradian and The Yearbook of Conrad Studies. He has also contributed articles on Sheridan and Swift to The Literary Encyclopedia. Richard Niland is Lecturer at the University of Strathclyde and has also taught at Richmond International University (London). He is the author of Conrad and History (2010) and the editor of Volume 3, A Personal Record to The Arrow of Gold, of Joseph Conrad: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge University Press, 2012). He has written for The Conradian, the Journal of Popular Culture and The Polish Review. Aaron Zacks is Lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas, Austin.

'While all of the volumes to appear to date in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad have been a great addition to the scholarly community interested in the works of Conrad, it may be that this edition of Victory is the most valuable book yet produced.' John Peters, English Literature in Transition