Edinburgh Napier University

  Professor Linda Dryden Joseph Conrad was a writer who crossed national boundaries both in his personal life and in his writing, particularly in his early Malay tales and in Heart of Darkness (1901), but also in his fictions set in England and Europe. A Pole, who later learned to speak French, and then English, Conrad was a much-travelled merchant seaman before he settled on a career as a writer. In his life as a mariner Conrad traversed the globe, encountering a variety of peoples and cultures, not just when he went ashore in those distant lands, but also as he worked alongside sailors from all sorts of backgrounds. Malay, Chinese, African, American, Filipino, Australian, German, Swedish, French: all of these nationalities and more feature at one point or another in Conrad's fictions and essays. And it was these encounters and experiences that shaped Conrad's world outlook when, in his thirties, he settled in England and became, ultimately, one of the most influential writers of fiction in English of his generation.