This volume considers Joseph Conrad's use of multiple genres including allusions to sensation
fiction pornography anthropology and Darwinian science to respond to Victorian
representations of gender in layered and contradictory representations of his own. In his
stories and later novels the familiar writer of sea stories centered on men moves to consider
the plight of women and the challenges of renegotiating gender roles in the context of the
early twentieth century. Conrad's rich and conflicted consideration of subjectivity and
alienation extends to some of his women characters and his complex use of genre allows him
both to prompt and to subvert readers' expectations of popular forms which typically offer
recognizable formulas for gender roles. He frames his critique through familiar sensationalized
typologies of women that are demonstrated in his fiction: the violent mother the murderess
the female suicide the fallen woman the adulteress and the traumatic victim.Considering
these figures through the roles and the taxonomies that they simultaneously embody and disrupt
this study exposes internalized patriarchal expectations that Conrad presents as both
illegitimate and inescapable.
