Joseph Conrad and the Voicing of Textuality offers an original
approach to Conrad's work rooted in linguistics and psychoanalytic
theory. Claude Maisonnat provides fresh insight into the poetics of
textuality by introducing the concept of textual voice, as opposed to
the traditional conceptions of authorial voice and narrative voice.
Understood as the main vector of poeticity in a text, textual voice is
an offshoot of the Lacanian object-voice trimmed to fit a literary
context. It enables the reader to uncover deeply concealed motivations
and perceive unsuspected connections to the biographical background of
the texts. At the same time, it offers new ways of structuring close
reading and opens vistas into the mysteries of creation. Maisonnat gives
insightful readings of Conrad's best-known and less widely read works
while developing a theoretically rich framework to tackle the notions of
style and voice in literature.
This book is volume 26 of the series Conrad: Eastern and Western
Perspectives, edited by Wieslaw Krajka.