ABSTRACT
What is not absurdly notional is that there are critics who, with benefit of a professional training and access to all o f Conrad’s work, have reached the same conclusion - an ‘outright glorification of English history and its triumphant upward curve to 1900’2 is how a recent exponent of this view categorises Conrad’s notori ously heterogeneous and disjunctive writing. So resolutely literal a reading of the words on the page reduces polysemous texts to monologic tracts, and would use the equivocal utterances o f a displaced emigre and Polish nationalist to position him as an acclimatised English patriot and propagandist.
