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1 results

  • Chapter 7 - Finance Capital and the Modern Corporation in Conrad’s Imperial Novels

  • from Part III - Modernism, Affect, and the Rise of the Modern Corporation
  • Regina Martin, Denison University, Ohio
  • Book:
    Modernism and Finance Capital
    Published online:
    12 December 2024
    Print publication:
    19 December 2024, pp 132-149

  • Summary

    Conrad’s novels engage in a critique of imperialism, but the precise nature of that critique persists as a source of debate among scholars. This chapter argues that three of Conrad’s novels – Lord Jim, Nostromo, and Victory – level an increasingly sharp critique at a system of capitalism and imperialism based on the modern corporation. In the novels, an opposition develops between an idealized British model of family-based capitalism and a corporate capitalism corrupted by investor ownership. In this dichotomy, the novels associate the family-based system of capitalism with the positivity of material value, meaning, character, and emotion that stands in contrast to the utter waste – the “nothing” of Victory’s end – left in the wake of an invisible and ever-changing network of social relations temporarily connected within the speculative structure of investor ownership and the new imperialism.