ABSTRACT
Kipling, Conrad and James incorporated into their writing something of the turbulent fascination with impurity which had previously characterized satire and tragedy, but not, to any comparable extent, the novel. It is this, as much as their celebrated irony, which makes them modern and, a different matter, interesting. They wrote about lives shaped, as Kristeva might put it, not by desire, but by exclusion; and they did so in ways that were at times almost impure, almost vulgar.
