Description: Offering an exciting forum for one of the most interesting and nascent areas of Conrad studies, this collection examines major and neglected works within the context of the performing arts, including popular theatrical traditions, early cinema, shadow plays, Shakespeare, and opera. Taken together, the essays provide, through solid scholarship and richly provocative speculation, new insight into Conrad's oeuvre, and invite future dialogue in the burgeoning field of Conrad and the performing arts.
Review Quotes: 'Ranging widely over Conrad's canon and generously interpreting "performance" to include displays of political power, this provocative collection of essays stylishly opens swathes of new territory in the field of Conrad studies. Alert to how popular culture enriches high art, this well-edited collection is required reading for anyone with an interest not only in Conrad but also in the literary achievements and trends of the late-Victorian and Modernist periods'. J. H. Stape, St Mary's University College, London, and author of The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad '...an excellent collection: eight original and thought-provoking articles remind the reader how much Conrad absorbed from the performing arts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Opera, theatre, cinema, shadowgraphy - the collaborative or competing influence of all of these very different branches of the performing arts can be traced in Conrad's fiction.' New Books on Literature 'Joseph Conrad and the Performing Arts opens up a great deal of new ground for Conradians as well as Victorian and modernist scholars more generally. And should it come their way, the volume will also prove intriguing to media studies scholars who may be surprised to learn that such a canonical literary figure as Conrad engaged so actively with the popular media of his day.' English Literature in Transition