This volume presents a galaxy of traditional and modern critical approaches to Joseph Conrad's oeuvre, ranging from biographical and autobiographical studies to literary comparisons with John Milton, Herman Melville, James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Cormac McCarthy; from postcolonial and Marxist analyses to reader-response, intertextual, and archetypal criticism. Some pieces incorporate the theoretical-philosophical insights of Josiah Royce, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan; others consult Jacques Derrida, Homi Bhabha, and Slavoj Žižek.

Apart from Conrad's life and its reflection in his writings, these essays illuminate such thematics as the critique of reality; nationalism; imperial evil; racism; landscape and truth; impressionism; psychological archetypes; doubling and defamiliarization; alienation and selfhood; the uncanny; imaginary identification and the real; ideology as specter; unconditional hospitality; the theory of whirling and veering; and academic teachings of Conrad, both their past character and future possibilities.