Conrad’s Eastern Vision: A Vain and Floating Appearance

This book traces the dialogic relation between Conrad's Eastern fiction and other histories and argues that it is precisely in the intersections of art and history that we locate Conrad's irony. The dialogism of Conrad's East resists any finalising meaning and its loophole lies in subjective vision. In a direct response to the visual culture of his times, Conrad sets up his fictional world as a hallucinated mirage even as he stresses the veracity of his own Eastern vision.