This chapter describes some of the salient characteristics of the ‘preface essay’, a form with a long history that has not received sustained critical attention. With reference to existing theories of the preface by Gérard Genette and Jacques Derrida as well as important examples of the form by authors mainly in the English literary tradition, ranging from John Dryden, through William Wordsworth, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and to Zadie Smith, this chapter provides a conceptual framework for authorial preface essays, their generic characteristics, and what they reveal about the relationship between the prefatorial and the essayistic. It will argue that the preface essay is a space of authorial self-crafting that attains durability and literary value by combining aspects of the prefatorial, such as its dependence on the work it prefaces and its occasionality, with the essayistic movement from the specific to the general, and the particular to the abstract.

The Coda sketches how the distinctive tradition of uncertainty in nineteenth-century literature and culture changes with the rise of literary modernism. Uncertainty remains of vital interest to writers like Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster. Yet a more self-conscious embrace of chance, contingency, and randomness, alongside a more thoroughgoing skepticism, disengages this writing from the earlier literature’s concerns. Further valences acquired by the concept of uncertainty in the early twentieth century – as radical indeterminacy in physics and contrast class to risk in economics – both intensify cultural interest in the topic and disarticulate its nineteenth-century framework. In a reading of Joseph Conrad’s novel Chance (1914), I argue that his emphasis on the value of momentary judgments, on knowledge as mercurial and provisional, and on the role of accident in literary plots all reprise Victorian tactics.

Far from being deservedly neglected outliers, the Niger and Congo expeditions were in many respects emblematic of British efforts to explore Africa. The historical forces that did so much to shape the trajectories of the Niger and Congo expeditions—slavery and the slave trade, imperial rivalries with other European powers, and the roles of African states and communities—were a persistent feature of these efforts. Failure was a frequent outcome. The preoccupation with the Niger River and West Africa persisted through the first half of the century and the renewal of interest in the Congo River and Equatorial Africa toward the end of the century spurred the Scramble for Africa. The main throughline that runs from Mungo Park at the start of the century through the Niger and Congo expeditions to the many British explorers who trekked across Africa in the decades that followed was a shared sense of hubris.

This essay considers the ways in which Sebald’s engagement with his literary predecessors expresses his aim, explored in all his major books from Nach der Natur (After Nature, 1988) to Austerlitz (2001), of understanding the historically constructed condition of ‘culture’. Beyond the impact of specific individuals on his work – from Thomas Browne to Joseph Conrad, from Thomas Bernhard to Vladimir Nabokov – the essay considers why the idea of a literary tradition was so important to Sebald’s creative project, and how his intertextual engagement with this tradition helped shape the very terms of his writing. What does it mean, we can ask of Sebald with Susan Sontag, to be ‘a European at the end of European civilization’?

One of Ford’s heart patients in The Good Soldier (1915), a Mr Hurlbird, has a habit of handing out ‘cool California oranges’ to everyone he meets. Ford offers little explanation for this behaviour beyond the clue that Hurlbird is a ‘violent Democrat’ – a phrase that would perhaps have conjured in the minds of contemporary readers the endeavours of William Jennings Bryan and other economic pragmatists to introduce a version of what we would now call ‘quantitative easing’: namely, an agreement from the US central bank to print money according to demand. This chapter proposes that British attitudes towards monetary value in the first two decades of the twentieth century were beginning to give way to the influence of American pragmatists like Bryan. Keynes writes in an essay of 1923: ‘The fluctuations in the value of money since 1914 have been on a scale so great as to constitute … one of the most significant events in the economic history of the world.’ Monetary value was beginning to change its character from a non-negotiable essence to an instrument of policy. This chapter traces the imprint of this incipient British economic pragmatism in the work of Keynes, Conrad, and Ford.

This chapter turns to the city as imagined in literary impressionism from the early twentieth century, reflecting on the spectral, ethereal landscape of Singapore as it appears in the fiction of Joseph Conrad. In Conrad’s writing, the neoclassical buildings housing the banks and corporations appear superimposed, rendering Singapore’s grand and solid modernity strangely superficial and insubstantial. As scholars have argued, this works to unsettle the city’s colonial identity as a triumph of modernity and order over primeval jungle, making Conrad’s Singapore an archetypal ‘unreal city’ and a crucial location for the development of urban impressionism. This chapter shows how Conrad not only stages the breakdown of colonial progress but also engages critically with the British laissez-faire discourses framing the city’s foundational identity as a free port. In this way, a connection opens up between his experiments with narrative agency and the city’s own colonial identity as the product of the ‘invisible hand’ of market forces.

Chapter 2 follows the coal extracted from the countryside of rural England to arrive in the humming, phosphorescent, non-stop pulsation of the metropolis. Virginia Woolf’s argument for a writer’s need to control her own rest and living space in A Room of One’s Own provides a basis for analyzing how social action determines the built environment. In order to articulate the growing relation between industrial “exhaust” and physical “exhaustion,” the chapter turns to a discussion of “atmosphere” in James Joyce’s Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. Surveying the trajectory of environmental groups such as the Smoke Abatement League of Great Britain, I consider both the benefits and limitations to the primarily visual aesthetics that surrounded discussions of pollution. The rise of gasworks to create “clean,” smokeless fuels removed soot from the air but often poisoned workers and waterways. I outline a modernist aesthetics of atmosphere that is not primarily visual but proprioceptive. Atmosphere in its local and global, visible and invisible manifestations reveals the subtle interactions between personal and public spaces in the metropolis.

The works of Joseph Conrad (b. 1857) and D. H. Lawrence (b. 1885) came from deeper sources than Boldrewood’s (see Chapter 7) and are far more ambitious in scope and thematic concern. In such cases the biographical sources and initiating phases of the work’s existence generally repay intent study.

The tortured genesis and revision of Conrad’s Under Western Eyes (1911) is clarified by reference to MSS materials. The work–version relationship is put under productive stress, the implications for editing are pursued, and a book-historically informed avenue for literary study is demonstrated.

The marvellous new world of widespread literacy and the ready availability of print, complemented by the effects of the US Chace Act of 1891, the rise of literary agents and upmarket literary publishers such as Seltzer and Secker mediated the forms of Lawrence’s idiosyncratic writings. Since every act of writing presupposes a reading, even in Lawrence’s case, literary study needs to be informed by this conditioning context. The versionality of his writings uncovered by the Cambridge Works editors argues the need for a digital critical archive of his writings organised on a temporal principle.

The new opportunities, experiences, and limits of liberal internationalist order produced a distinctive kind of feminist-internationalist genre, the internationalist typewriter fiction. The bestselling novelist Rose Macaulay, Hogarth Press intimate Alice Ritchie, journalist and novelist Winifred Holtby, also Virginia Woolf: all wrote of clerks, secretaries, and typists at liberal internationalist offices during the postwar period, for a feminist audience both dependent on and resistant to empire. These fictions contest the familiar modernist trope of the passive “typist home at teatime,” as in Eliot and Conrad, and open up new ways to read the textual traces of liberal governance. Feminist depictions of liberal world order, particularly in the Mandate territories of Africa, allow us to track the complex network of paperwork, romance, and race that organized neo-imperial rule under the Mandate system. Depictions of typists and office work also allow us a new way into reading the imaginative life of the new technical-managerial economic order that rose to increasing prominence between the wars.

This chapter explores the relationship between Shakespeare and climate. Taking its inspiration from weather disruptions to the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America conference, it riffs on the tweets that this climatic disturbance generated and the themes they reveal. It deals with the issues of: climate and its material effects on Shakespearean composition and performance, whereby climate and culture may be said to be co-constitutive; the resistance in Shakespeare’s time to codifying climate, in partial acknowledgement of climate’s unpredictability; and thus the extent to which Shakespearean texts portend human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.

This chapter outlines the ways in which historical traditions of climatic medicine influenced nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial discourses. It further examines three authors’ engagements with and reaction to these discourses, in both fictional and non-fictional literatures of empire. Rather than simply recapitulating pro-imperial uses of climate science, works by Richard Burton, Joseph Conrad, and Rudyard Kipling all ‘map’ race and climate in a way that reflects the ambivalences and contradictions at the heart of colonial discourse. Further, this chapter analyses the imaginative potential provided by the structures of fiction for authors like Conrad and Kipling to grapple with concepts of chronic disease, bodily transformation, adaptation, and degeneration in Africa and India.