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‘A Conrad Archipelago Replete with Islands’: Edwardian Reading Communities

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Conrad's Reading

Part of the book series: New Directions in Book History ((NDBH))

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Abstract

Conrad’s own shore based reading community is examined, focusing on his two most important under investigated but lifelong male friendships, John Galsworthy and R.B. Cunninghame Graham. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notions of cultural, social and financial capital, the changing economies of these friendships, which were sustained by letters about shared reading, including each other’s manuscripts and books, are scrutinised. This broadens to investigate shared periodical reading, questioning why this might be important to these writers, and particularly to Conrad as he progressed from an imagined to a real reading community. Then, after a glance at the embedded narrative of newspaper reading in Chance, the chapter concludes with an innovative reading of the Ford-Conrad collaboration The Inheritors, a text saturated with contemporaneous reading experiences, and allusions to material texts, including periodicals.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

    Helen Chambers

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  1. Helen Chambers
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Correspondence to Helen Chambers .

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Chambers, H. (2018). ‘A Conrad Archipelago Replete with Islands’: Edwardian Reading Communities. In: Conrad's Reading. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76487-0_5

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