The dawn watch : Joseph Conrad in a global world
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"From one of America's most exciting historians, the astonishing life and times of Joseph Conrad, a visionary guide to the turbulent age of globalization Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, Goethe and the Romantics -- great artists can become tutelary spirits for their age. As Maya Jasanoff argues, Joseph Conrad did not merely embody the soul of his time, he anticipated our own. Through his journeys from Poland to France, England to Malaysia, Belgium to Congo, he witnessed a turning point in international history. He learned first-hand about immigration, terrorism, imperial oppression, the dangers of nationalism, and the promise and peril of rapid technological innovation. His life and work present an inside history of globalization and eerily reflect the hypocrisies of the West's most cherished ideals. Joseph Conrad was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857, in a region of Poland then controlled by Russia, Europe's most autocratic empire. By 1862, his father had been arrested for fomenting revolution and his family sentenced to exile, where a series of miserable forced relocations precipitated the illnesses that killed both of Conrad's parents before he was eleven. At sixteen, fleeing an orphan's sadness, he abandoned everything he knew to pursue the unlikely dream of becoming a sailor. From the deck of a ship, he saw the surging, competitive "new imperialism" that placed a flag on every populated part of the world by century's end. He got a close look, too, at the places "beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines, " as empires expanded their reach into the so-called dark places of the earth"--,Provided by publisher.