This volume is the product of new research on Conrad’s engagement with the arts during his lifetime. Beginning with nineteenth-century Polish landscape painting and Polish theatre, the essays move through music and the performing arts during Conrad’s time in Marseilles; the opera Conrad encountered in Australia; and Conrad’s later-life knowledge of recent and contemporary classical music. Subsequent essays demonstrate his familiarity with contemporary visual art (particularly through his friendships with various artists in London); his interest in dance; and his active involvement in contemporary theatre and screen-writing. The volume concludes with a discussion of Conrad’s art as a novelist and playwright, his ‘theatrical imagination’, in relation to developments in theatre theory of the time.
