The political turn of the novel: the modernist novel in the post-war era and Joseph Conrad's Nostromo

Can T.

INTERACTIONS: AEGEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES/EGE INGILIZ VE AMERIKAN INCELEMELERI DERGISI, cilt.24, ss.43-56, 2014 (Hakemli Dergi)

Özet

In the aftermath of the Great War, the experimental ferment of modernism that dominated the first two decades of the twentieth century gradually faded, leaving its place to more conventional narratives with socio-political themes. The devastation and dislocation caused by the war led modernist writers to leave aside their aesthetic concerns and reconsider the role of the novel as an instrument of socio-political criticism. Joseph Conrad's literary career is an example of the transformation that the novelists were undergoing in the post-war era. In what is often referred to as "political phase" in his career, Conrad wrote three novels with overtly political themes, namely Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907) and Under the Western Eyes (1911). This article aims at analysing Nostromo as a pertinent example of Conrad's artistic vision that foresaw the course of development the modernist novel would follow in the postwar period. Keywords: Modernism, Capitalism, The Great War, Joseph Conrad, Nostromo.