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Joseph Conrad's 'Karain: A Memory' (1897) is not often cited as a landmark of literary modernism. Conrad's Malay story appeared during the year in which The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' announced his arrival as an author with modernist ambitions. It also belongs to the same Blackwood's period of his early career that produced arguably his most celebrated work, 'Heart of Darkness'. Whereas these stories consensually exemplify Conrad's modernism, 'Karain' tends to be construed as an early working-through of the contemporary popular influences that shaped his literary output. Yet, in a significant sense, it also dramatizes the colonial encounter that defined some of the conceptual contours of modernism. This essay explores the story's composition, early transmission and reception, its self-conscious engagement with its popular cultural lineage, and Conrad's parallel emergence as a writer of 'challenging' fiction. Its aim is not merely to recuperate 'Karain' as a work of early modernism, nor simply to re-evaluate Conrad's story as a rehearsal, in terms of its interrogative relationship with imperialism, for some of his more overtly anti-colonialist fiction. Rather, its wider focus is on how Conrad's story reflects upon the nature of empire and modernism as mutually sustaining enterprises, and, counter to the view of other modernist authors such as T. S. Eliot, how colonial fiction and modernist writing are not antithetical but rather interrelated literary practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on ‘The Planter of Malata’, the first of four tales from Joseph Conrad’s 1915 collection of short fiction, Within the Tides. Despite the weight of scholarship devoted to Conrad, this Australian-set story has yet to receive much, comparatively speaking, in the way of critical investigation. Conrad’s story is, I argue, of interest to cultural historians and literary critics alike. After briefly placing it in the context of Conrad’s personal contact with Australia during his sea years, I consider the story against a broader debate then taking place, concerning the political vision of a ‘White Australia’. I explore how Conrad’s story is attentive to an historical shift in European perceptions of Australia, from being regarded as inimical to European settlement during its early phases, to attempts during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century to cultivate Australia as a space solely for whites, as adumbrated in the ‘White Australia’ legislation that followed Federation in 1901. Although generally dismissed as a dry-run for Conrad’s 1915 novel Victory, and judged a critical failure by the standards set by his earlier fiction, in terms of the historical issues to which it is attuned ‘The Planter of Malata’ stands on its own as a work of considerable richness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]