Joseph Conrad

Cedric Watts

The Nigger of the Narcissus (Penguin Classics)

What is the play really about? Tragedy, history, problem play - what is its genre? Who, if anyone, is the play's hero? Is the murder of Caesar justified? Is Brutus a hypocritical Stoic? How does posthumous characterisation work? What makes the play so topical? ""Julius Caesar"" has long been regarded as one of Shakespeare's greatest dramas. Some of its phrases live on famously: "Beware the Ides of March"; "Et tu, Brute?"; and "Friends, Romans, countrymen: lend me your ears!". When Cassius says, "How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over, / In states unborn and accents yet unknown?", his question is indeed prophetic: history's answer has transformed the question into a boast. This concise, clear introduction explains just why. Professor Cedric Watts, M.A, Ph.D., is the editor of the Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series. In 2020, this book was banned by Amazon!

Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar': A Critical Introduction

Cedric Watts, Emeritus Professor of English at Sussex University, gathers here fifteen of his literary essays which were previously published in a diversity of locations. They include some of his most popular and controversial pieces, notably: ' The Semiotics of Othello'; 'Bakhtin's Monologism'; 'Haunting Conrad's Under Western Eyes'; and 'Jews and Degenerates in The Secret Agent'. Several of the essays concern Shakespeare and Conrad, but there are also discussions of Keats, Sterne, Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, and Edward Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

ÔRescuing MirandaÕ And Further Literary Essays

Cedric Thomas Watts

Still one of Shakespeare's best loved and most performed plays, Romeo and Juliet has become the definitive love story of Western literature. Its lyrical depiction of an ill-fated romance has stirred audiences and inspired more adaptations and imitations than any other Shakespearean work. Widely considered the epitome of articulate romanticism, Romeo and Juliet also contains a subtext of sexual politics and generational conflict that echoes in relevance to the present day. In this study Cedric Watts uses both traditional and contemporary critical approaches to reveal the complexity underlying Shakespeare's romantic tragedy. Examining the scholarly problems raised by the play, Watts pays particular attention to its structure and ironic interplay of characterization. The author provides a detailed account of the sexual politics at work in the drama, examining the views it offers on arranged marriage, romantic love, and the treatment of women in society. Demonstrating the contrast of lyricism and bawdry in the play, Watts argues that Romeo and Juliet is a much more radical work than has previously been regarded. Watt's cogent analysis reveals the many contrasting elements of Romeo and Juliet--its high comedy and bitter tragedy, sociable festivity and private raptures violent hatred and pacific understanding, impetuous youth and stubborn age, realistically expressive language and witty linguistic display. By examining the play's attempt to bridge these disparate aspects, this unique reading breathes new life into a work whose familiarity often causes modern audiences and readers to lose sight of its position as one of Shakespeare's masterpieces.

Romeo and Juliet

A biographical chapter relates The Secret Agent to Conrad's career. Next, the work's process of composition is discussed, and differences between the serial, the book version and the stage version are explained. An analysis of the plot gives particular attention to its ironic strategies and to the character of the narrator. Various themes and contexts are explored: conceptions of time and topography; anarchistic and Fenian politics; anti-Semitism; evolution, Lombroso and criminology. Literary influences and analogues are illustrated: Dickens, Zola, Ibsen, terrorist fiction. The characters are considered from various viewpoints. A critical survey summarises the work's reception since its first publication. The bibliography provides a guide to further reading.

Joseph Conrad: 'The Secret Agent'

Mr. Jolyon Connell

Few novels have caused more of a stir than Tess of the d’Urbervilles. In England, the Duchess of Abercorn stated that she divided her dinner-guests according to their view of Tess. If they deemed her “a little harlot”, she put them in one group; if they said “Poor wronged innocent!”, she put them in another. It is a telling illustration of the novel’s word-of-mouth success. The Daily News wittily claimed that “pessimism (we had almost said Tessimism) is popular and fashionable”. Fan-mail arrived: Hardy said that his mail from readers even included confessional letters from various wives who, like Tess, had gained premarital sexual experience but, unlike her, had not told their husbands of it. Hardy’s fame was now so great that he was a frequent guest at fashionable dinner parties. In 1892 he recorded that Tess’s fame had spread round the world and that translations were multiplying, “its publication in Russia exciting great interest”. Controversy generated publicity. Publicity generated prosperity. Sales of Tess far surpassed those of any of Hardy’s previous works, and between 1900 and 1930 was reprinted “some forty times in England alone”. In addition to making Hardy famous and rich, the scandalous Tess attracted, and has continued to attract, an extraordinary range of critical opinion. Victorian reviewers, humanists, neo-Marxists, deconstructionists, cultural materialists, new historicists: everyone has had something to say about the novel. This book, drawing on the best of these critics, shows why, for all its faults, it has such power, and explains the angry and uncompromising vision of the world contained within its pages.

Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Ubervilles

The co-ordinating theme of this study is that Hardy designed Tess of the d'Urbervilles to be controversial, and it has surpassed his design. An initial biographical chapter relates Tess to Hardy's career: the novel caused scandal but brought him wealth. Next, the work's process of composition is discussed, and differences between the censored serial and the book versions are explained. An analysis of the plot gives particular attention to its ironic strategies, and a further section deals with problematic aspects of characterisation, including the views of the narrator. Various themes and contexts are explored, notably Hardy's attitudes to religion, evolution, politics and sexuality. There follows a discussion of selected literary aspects: naturalism and realism, leitmotifs and thematic patterns, optical effects and defamiliarisation, and the use of specialised vocabularies. Hardy's descriptive powers when rendering the rural world receive particular analysis. A critical survey then summarises critical approaches to this novel between Hardy's day and the present.

Cedric Watts

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