ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses climatological and human disruption of the natural world as key elements of Conrad’s fictional achievement. Much of the media and scholarly attention to Conrad has emphasized his political fictions about terror bombings, government and police corruptions and covert agents operating amid poor and middle-class citizenries in varying states of oblivion and exhaustion. In all of Conrad’s fictions, any notion that a model “civilization” might be found in contemporary nineteenth-century Europe, or that a savage or natural “wilderness” might provide the justification for Europe’s colonizing expansion, is stripped away. Environmental readings can also foreground the significance of material nature in Conrad’s work. For Cronon the long period dominated by a Romantic narrative of wilderness and transcendence enforced a false dualism between nature and culture while tending to obscure the Eurocentric domination of indigenous groups and working people.
