The present article is part of a larger project on Conrad’s less known short fiction, the area of his writing which is largely undervalued, and even deprecated at times. The paper’s aim is to enhance the appreciation of “A Smile of Fortune,” by drawing attention to its “inner texture” as representative of Conrad’s “art of expression,” especially in view of the writer’s own belief in the supremacy of form over content as well as “suggestiveness” over “explicitness” in his fiction. To achieve this aim a New Critical (“close reading”), intertextual and comparative approaches to Conrad’s story have been adopted, involving nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literary texts, i.e., both those preceding and those following the publication of Conrad’s ’Twixt Land and Sea (1912) volume featuring the tale in question. The intertextual reading of “A Smile of Fortune” against Bernard Malamud’s short story “The Magic Barrel,” Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, with Light in August as a point of reference, reveals the workings in Conrad’s story of the modernist device of denegation, which, alongside antithesis and oxymoron, seems to be largely responsible for the tale’s contradictions and ambiguities, which should thus be perceived as the story’s asset rather than flaw. The textual evidence of Conrad’s tale, as well as its comparison with three short stories: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and Peter Taylor’s “Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time,” seem to confirm the presence of the implications of the theme of incest in Conrad’s text, heretofore unrecognized in criticism. Overall, the foregoing analysis of “A Smile of Fortune” hopes to account for, if not disentangle, the story’s complex narratological meanderings and seemingly insoluble ambiguities, particularly as regards character and motive, naming Conrad rather than Faulkner the precursor of denegation.

Since 1989 (the fall of Communism) the performing arts in Bulgaria have suffered a long process of transition dominated by a certain dialectic tension between the necessity to meet economic needs and the desire to open new venues for dramatic art. Against this background and contributing its own perceptive “reading” of Heart of Darkness to Conrad’s Bulgarian reception, on the eve of the vigorous celebration of his 160th anniversary in 2017, stage director Valeria Valcheva’s theatrical adaptation represents a remarkable debut rendition of Conrad’s fiction. The aim of this article is to explore how her idiosyncratic, creative, poetically recognizable approach lends a new form to Conrad’s recurrent relocation in modern and contemporary Bulgarian art.

* The present article complements, expands and rethinks the authors’ latest study of the Bulgarian dramatization of Heart of Darkness, published in Bulgarian in Proglas journal, aiming to contribute to the discussions of Conrad’s reception in a wider academic space. See Margreta Grigorova and Petya Tsoneva, “ ‘Sartseto na mraka’—idei i resheniya na parvata balgarska postanovka” [Heart of Darkness on the Bulgarian Stage: Creative Perspectives and Techniques], Proglas 28, no. 1 (2019), pp. 35-46.

With the rise of trauma theory in late 19th century, researchers have focused on foregrounding the significance of some catastrophic events that pertain mainly to the collective, leaving other forms of trauma and their psychological aftermath on the individual underrepresented. In this paper, I focus on social traumas in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, which seems to be overlooked by some critics whose insights highlight primarily its political aspect. The events of the novel revolve around the peculiar and traumatic experience of Winnie Verloc whose life is rife with betrayal and violence. Her recurrent exposure to successive shocking events culminates in her dissociation and, consequently, her suicide. To pin down what lies beneath Winnie’s ambiguity, aloofness and silence in the novel, I mainly rely on trauma theory, drawing from studies on PTSD, betrayal and dissociation by several trauma scholars, such as, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Jennifer Freyd, and others. Furthermore, this paper examines the inextricability of the past from the present in trauma through the breadth scrutiny of Winnie’s psychological response to her excruciating experience. Hence the way the appalling past returns unbidden to shake Winnie’s present.

The aim of this paper is to find connections between the digital game Sunless Sea (Failbetter Games, 2015) and Joseph Conrad’s novels, particularly the ones touching on the subject of sea voyage. Sunless Sea is an exploration role-playing game which focuses on the topics of sailors’ loneliness, dual nature of the sea, and above all, player’s inevitable failure. These tropes are shown not only in the narrative structure of the game, but also in its mechanics and design choices. I believe that the game is heavily inspired by the notion of maritime life created by Conrad, as indicated by the quote from The Mirror of the Sea opening the game: “The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.”

On the example of Apocalypse Now by F. F. Coppola, Heart of Darkness by N. Roeg, The Duellists by R. Scott, The Shadow Line by A. Wajda, and Secret Sharer by P. Fudakowski, I would like to show that Joseph Conrad’s prose is a cinematic trap for film directors. This being so, I attempt to answer the question as to why it is so difficult to make a film of something that is so cinematic, when it is being read, and why film adaptations that closely follow Conrad’s narratives are less Conradian than films which are “merely” inspired by Conrad’s works.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the modern experience of love, to which the entire narrative of the Planter of Malata has been devoted. The modern approach to the subject will be understood here as the penetration of the sacred sphere into the domain of the profane. Thanks to this mechanism, it becomes possible to create the expression of an indirect, confused, quasi-sacred experience. Conrad’s protagonist thus sees a woman in terms of “sanctity,” which will be interpreted in terms of “modern idolatry” (J.-L. Marion), eliminating any distance between the worshiper and the object of worship. The main scope of the analyses will concern the consequences that result from the starting point established in this way. Conrad’s text confirms the assumption that “pain is a sign and a means of contact with the divine” (D. Morris), but at the same time indicates many levels at which this process takes place.

* The project was founded by The National Science Centre (Poland) on the basis of decision number 2012/05/B/HS2/04065.

Review of: Conrad’s Drama: Contemporary Reviews and Observations. Edited by John G. Peters. Leiden–Boston, MA: Brill–Rodopi, 2019, 515 pp.