John G. Peters – författare

The co-winner of 2022 Adam Gillon Book Award in Conrad Studies, Conrad and Nature is the first collection of critical essays examining nature and the environment in Joseph Conrad’s writings. Together, these essays by established and emerging scholars reveal both the crucial importance of nature in Conrad’s work, and the vital, ongoing relevance of Conrad’s treatment of the environment in our era of globalization and climate change. No richer subject matter for an environmentally-engaged criticism can be found than the Conradian contexts and themes under investigation in this volume: island cultures, colonial occupations, storms at sea, mining and extraction, inconstant weather, ecological collapse, and human communities competing for resources. The 17 essays collected here —13 new essays, and 4 excerpts from classic works of Conradian scholarship -- consolidate some of the most important voices and perspectives on Conrad’s relation to the natural world, and open new avenues for Conradian and environmental scholarship in the 21st century.

This book considers the relationship between sound and silence in the works of Joseph Conrad, along with their ties to Western and non-Western space. Throughout Conrad’s works, a pattern emerges where Western space is associated with sound and non-Western space is associated with silence; similarly, Western space is portrayed as full of objects and activity, whereas non-Western space is portrayed as empty. As these tales progress, though, Conrad’s characters embark on transformational journeys that cause them to reassess the world they live in and sometimes even the nature of the universe. These journeys invariably occur through encountering non-Western space, and during the course of these journeys, the dichotomy between Western space, perceived as replete with sound and activity, and non-Western space, empty of such, blurs such that the fullness of the West is revealed to be simply a surface hiding the emptiness beneath. In the end, both Western and non-Western space are revealedto be absences, as the absence of sound becomes a correlative for the emptiness of space and the emptiness of space becomes a metonym for the cosmological emptiness of nothingness.