Allan Simmons – författare

"Reader's Guides" provide a comprehensive starting point for any advanced student, giving an overview of the context, criticism and influence of key works. Each guide also offers students fresh critical insights and provides a practical introduction to close reading and to analysing literary language and form. They provide up-to-date, authoritative but accessible guides to the most commonly studied classic texts. Joseph Conrad's novella, "Heart of Darkness" (1902), is a key text in the development of modernism and one of the most important literary works of the early twentieth century. This guide provides an invaluable introduction to reading Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and includes sections on its contexts, language and style, critical reception and literary and film adaptations, including Coppola's "Apocalypse Now", and finally an annotated guide to further reading.

"Reader's Guides" provide a comprehensive starting point for any advanced student, giving an overview of the context, criticism and influence of key works. Each guide also offers students fresh critical insights and provides a practical introduction to close reading and to analysing literary language and form. They provide up-to-date, authoritative but accessible guides to the most commonly studied classic texts. Joseph Conrad's novella, "Heart of Darkness" (1902), is a key text in the development of modernism and one of the most important literary works of the early twentieth century. This guide provides an invaluable introduction to reading Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and includes sections on its contexts, language and style, critical reception and literary and film adaptations, including Coppola's "Apocalypse Now", and finally an annotated guide to further reading.

Published in 1914, Joseph Conrad's Chance, with its female protagonist, Flora de Barral, and happy ending, represented a new departure in his writings. Aided by the robust advertising efforts of his American publisher, Doubleday, Page, Chance was also his first major financial success. This comprehensive critical edition includes an introduction to the novel's origins and sources, while explanatory notes detail literary and historical references, identify real-life places and people, and indicate borrowings and Gallicisms. A textual essay and its accompanying apparatus lay out the history of composition and publication, detailing interventions made by Conrad's typists, compositors, and editors. Also included are appendices, a glossary of nautical terms, a genealogy of the text, and reproductions of early drafts. By returning to (and respecting) Conrad's early manuscript and typescript states, this edition presents Chance and its preface in a form more authoritative than any so far printed.

Joseph Conrad is one of the great figures in the tradition of the novel. This clear and well-written study provides a critically-informed introduction to Conrad and his work, placing him in his political, social and literary context, and examining his relationship to Modernism, England and Empire. Organised thematically - broaching the leading themes of race, the sea and nationalism - Allan H. Simmons covers the range of Conrad's fiction, from the early Malay novels, through such key works as Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, to his later novels.First-time readers of Conrad are provided with in-depth contexts for appreciating a writer whose work is often challenging, while readers already familiar with Conrad's fiction will find new perspectives with which to view it. Approachable and authoritative, this introductory guide is essential for anyone with an interest in a master of twentieth-century fiction whose work variously altered the English and European literary landscape.