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Title details for The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff - Wait list

The Dawn Watch

Joseph Conrad in a Global World

by Maya Jasanoff
Laurel Lekfow
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“Enlightening, compassionate, superb” —John Le Carré
Winner of the 2018 Cundhill History Prize
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017
One of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2017

A visionary exploration of the life and times of Joseph Conrad, his turbulent age of globalization and our own, from one of the most exciting young historians writing today
Migration, terrorism, the tensions between global capitalism and nationalism, and a communications revolution: these forces shaped Joseph Conrad’s destiny at the dawn of the twentieth century. In this brilliant new interpretation of one of the great voices in modern literature, Maya Jasanoff reveals Conrad as a prophet of globalization. As an immigrant from Poland to England, and in travels from Malaya to Congo to the Caribbean, Conrad navigated an interconnected world, and captured it in a literary oeuvre of extraordinary depth. His life story delivers a history of globalization from the inside out, and reflects powerfully on the aspirations and challenges of the modern world.
 
Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857, to Polish parents in the Russian Empire. At sixteen he left the landlocked heart of Europe to become a sailor, and for the next twenty years travelled the world’s oceans before settling permanently in England as an author. He saw the surging, competitive "new imperialism" that planted a flag in almost every populated part of the globe. He got a close look, too, at the places “beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines,” and the hypocrisy of the west’s most cherished ideals.
 
In a compelling blend of history, biography, and travelogue, Maya Jasanoff follows Conrad’s routes and the stories of his four greatest works—The Secret Agent, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo. Genre-bending, intellectually thrilling, and deeply humane, The Dawn Watch embarks on a spell-binding expedition into the dark heart of Conrad’s world—and through it to our own.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    November 7, 2017

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780525498391
      • File size: 291950 KB
      • Duration: 10:08:13

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      This audiobook is sure to awaken new interest in Joseph Conrad, one of the towering figures in the old patriarchal canon. Maya Jasanoff looks at Conrad and his principal novels not in the context of masculine adventure, but in the context of an intercontinental society in which, then as now, imperialism and power politics rule. Laurel Lefkow proves a sensitive and highly effective narrator. Like Jasanoff's, her contemporary female voice speaks with compassionate objectivity about factors such as the role Conrad's clinical depression played in his life and writing. This is a fine selection for new readers of Conrad, and those of us who, decades ago, struggled through the heart of modernism. D.A.W. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 26, 2017
      Harvard historian Jasanoff (Liberty’s Exiles) undertakes a review of Joseph Conrad’s life and work that broadens into an acute, original study of 19th-century European imperialism and an emergent globalized world. Polish-born Conrad (1857–1924) was an accomplished seaman before he turned to writing, having learned English as an adult and picked up on the craft of fiction in part from reading Charles Dickens. He became one of England’s most celebrated authors and prose stylists. Jasanoff’s vivid descriptions of Conrad’s travels enrich this narrative. From the extraction of ivory to the impact of rubber demand, she describes the dreadful Belgian colonial trade that Conrad knew firsthand, having worked briefly on a Congo riverboat, a job that he detested and in which he encountered a “European regime of appalling greed, violence, and hypocrisy” that informed his novels. But Jasanoff’s more anachronistic language, such as a description of her subject as “a dead white man” who was “alarmingly prejudiced” by contemporary standards, gives the impression that she is judging him by today’s very different moral standards. Despite this, Jasanoff’s skillfully written book makes a persuasive case that Conrad was “one of us: a citizen of a global world.” Agent: Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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