In A Political Genealogy of Joseph Conrad, Ruppel proposes a much-needed critical intervention into Conrad’s complicated and ambivalent engagement with political discourse and ideology, particularly in the major novels. Surveying the criticism surrounding Conradian politics, Ruppel finds that previous critics unjustly pigeonholed Conrad as a profoundly conservative, even reactionary, writer. Arguing vigorously against this time-honored truism, Ruppel contends that the émigré polyglot’s political ideas and leanings were 'radically contingent,' particularly in relation to the audience he envisioned for himself. In tightly structured arguments in successive chapters on the major works, Ruppel reveals Conrad as politically protean rather than staunchly conservative. Far from a hindrance or an impediment to his aesthetic designs, his political mutability allowed him to throw into question grand narratives that underlie and structure political relations. This necessary, useful volume offers a fresh and engaging approach to the writer’s complex novelistic expressions of the political. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Choice Reviews

Ruppel provides a substantial analysis that nicely weaves historical texts and figures with Conrad's fiction and nonfiction.... Ultimately, A Political Genealogy of Joseph Conrad offers an insightful overview of not only Conrad's works, but also the varying factors that influenced Conrad throughout his writing career, and it adeptly supplements interpretations of Conrad's shifting and ambiguous political temperaments.

Joseph Conrad Today

A Political Genealogy of Joseph Conrad is direct, clearly written, and stylistically effective. . . .This is a work well worth reading and one with which Conrad scholars in particular will want to be familiar.

English Literature In Translation

A very intelligent, insightful analysis of the contradictions of Conrad’s politics that refuse to be contained by a single grand narrative. Gracefully written, cogently argued, and well-researched, this book will be useful to scholars and students alike.

Paul B. Armstrong, Brown University

To the bracing iconoclasm already known to readers of Richard Ruppel's past work, A Political Genealogy of Joseph Conrad here adds a deft and dexterous way with textual subtlety, and a feel for how a genre can end up encouraging a political tendency all its own. In Ruppel's capable hands the reader sees how the adventure story may shadow forth Thomas Carlyle (what is Lord Jim's title character but the failed draft of a Great Man?), while the broader social canvas of epic will summon the specter of Marx (as in Nostromo's tale with "material interests" for its anti-hero). Readers nowadays expect the political introduction to a writer to bring him out from one or another door, as liberal good guy or reactionary oppressor. In his well-crafted sampler of texts, it is Ruppel's refreshing gesture to bring Joseph Conrad out from Door Number Three, as indeed a writer. What he leads us to realize, with a mastery of both style and substance, is that Conrad the writer, never really a political philosopher, was always a political animal down to the ground. Ruppel supplies that essential bit of truth for which the reader, especially in this era, has probably forgotten to ask.

Mark Conroy, Ohio State University