ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the original periodical context of Conrad's Lord Jim, which was first serialized in Blackwood's Magazine from October 1899 to November 1900. Serialized in Blackwood's from October 1899 to November 1900, Lord Jim was by far Conrad's longest contribution to the Edinburgh periodical with which his name is today most closely associated. Blackwood's offered Conrad a significantly smaller monthly circulation, but the magazine was distributed on a much wider scale. Conrad's 5-year creative association with Blackwood's coincided with an important period of transition for the magazine. What Conrad imaginatively achieves in Jim's desperate act, a flight beyond imperial modernity, is a provocative evasion of imperial modernity's information and communication infrastructure. Lord Jim's Patusan section develops Conrad's imaginary solution to this spread of global modernity, an extension of a European modernity already contaminated by its public obsession with spectacle, a social and intellectual failure of modern journalism, and the homogenization of cultural experience.
