Introduction

Abstract

Each of Conrad’s full-length novels and most of his shorter stories are written around some variant of a common structural framework, a core of conceptual interrelations and interactions of character types. This is not to say that Conrad continually rewrote the same story, or that he failed to develop over the thirty years of his career as a novelist; on the contrary, working with the structural framework he set up, Conrad was constantly experimenting, rearranging the components of his fictional universe to achieve different effects, so that almost every one of his longer works is in some significant way an advance on its predecessor. The first purpose of the present study is to trace this development.