Victory: An Island Tale

by Joseph Conrad, J. H. Stape (Editor), Alexandre Fachard (Editor), Richard Niland (Introduction)

Overview

Published in 1915, Victory: An Island Tale holds a special place in Conrad's later writings as a bold experiment in genre. The novel variously draws upon realism, allegory and melodrama to explore large themes: commitment and solidarity, the individual's relationship to society and the power of love. The Introduction situates the novel in Conrad's career and traces its sources and contemporary reception. The essay on the text and the apparatus lay out the history of the work's composition and publication, and detail the extensive interventions by Conrad's typists, compositors and editors. Also included are notes explaining literary and historical references, a glossary of nautical terms, illustrations including pictures of early drafts, and appendixes. Established through modern textual scholarship, this edition of Victory presents the novel in a form more authoritative than any so far printed, and restores a text that has circulated in highly defective forms since its original publication.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107101616
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	05/12/2016
Series:	The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad
Pages:	971
Product dimensions:	5.71(w) x 8.74(h) x 2.32(d)

About the Author

J. H. Stape is Senior Research Fellow at St Mary's University, Twickenham, London, and has taught at universities in England, Canada, France and the Far East. The author of The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (2007) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and The New Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (Cambridge University Press, 2014), he has edited and co-edited several volumes for The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad. He has also published on E. M. Forster, William Golding, Thomas Hardy, Frank Harris, Angus Wilson and Virginia Woolf.

Alexandre Fachard, Chargé de cours at the Universités de Lausanne and de Genève, teaches English literature. He has edited Within the Tides (Cambridge University Press, 2012) for The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad and has written for The Conradian and The Yearbook of Conrad Studies. He has also contributed articles on Sheridan and Swift to The Literary Encyclopedia.

Richard Niland is Lecturer at the University of Strathclyde and has also taught at Richmond International University (London). He is the author of Conrad and History (2010) and the editor of Volume 3, A Personal Record to The Arrow of Gold, of Joseph Conrad: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge University Press, 2012). He has written for The Conradian, the Journal of Popular Culture and The Polish Review.

Aaron Zacks is Lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas, Austin.

Date of Birth:

December 3, 1857

Date of Death:

August 3, 1924

Place of Birth:

Berdiczew, Podolia, Russia

Place of Death:

Bishopsbourne, Kent, England

Education:

Tutored in Switzerland. Self-taught in classical literature. Attended maritime school in Marseilles, France

Read an Excerpt

Set in the islands of the Malay Archipelago, Victory tells the story of a disillusioned Swede, Axel Heyst, who rescues Lena, a young English musician, from the clutches of a brutish German hotel owner. Seeking refuge at Heyst’s remote island retreat on Samburan, the couple is soon besieged by three villains dispatched by the enraged hotelier. The arrival on the island paradise of this trio of fiends sets off a terrifying series of events that ultimately ends in catastrophe.
“With Victory, Conrad inaugurated a new style and aesthetic,” writes Peter Lancelot Mallios in his Introduction. “The tremendous literary sophistication to be found in Victory does not result in the exclusion of the popular reader.”
The text of this Modern Library Paperback Classic was set from the first British edition, published by Methuen & Co. in 1915.

Author Biography: Peter Lancelot Mallios is an assistant professor of English and American Studies at the University of Maryland.

Table of Contents

General editors' preface; Chronology; Abbreviations and note on editions; Introduction; Victory: An Island Tale; The texts: an essay; Apparatus; Textual notes; Appendices; Explanatory notes; Glossaries; Map.

Editorial Reviews

'While all of the volumes to appear to date in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad have been a great addition to the scholarly community interested in the works of Conrad, it may be that this edition of Victory is the most valuable book yet produced.' John Peters, English Literature in Transition

From the Publisher

I have never started a novel…without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.”

Paris Review Joan Didion

Whatever you do, read Conrad’s latest—Victory. Read it, if you have to pawn your watch to buy it. Conrad has exceeded himself…I am glad that I am alive, if, for no other reason, because of the joy of reading this book.”

1915 Jack London