Empire and Modernism in Joseph Conrad's 'Karain: A Memory'.

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]