The first international conference ever held in Africa on the works of author Joseph Conrad took place in 1998, to mark the centenary of the publication of heart of darkness. This book draws its title from Conrad's short story, `An Outpost of Progress' which represented the responses of a European to colonial settler assumptions about progress and backwardness, in the light of his first-hand experience of Europeans in Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. The 13 essays in this collection engage directly with the ways in which Conrad's fiction explores and problematises the notion of `progress', not only at the time when he was writing but now, more than a century later. Although the relationship between modernist and postcolonial literature has been theorised by critics in Britain, Europe and America since the late 1980s, for the first time, this book brings these debates to Africa.

This important addition to Conrad studies, as well as to the study of narrative, is the first book-length attempt to apply recent developments in critical theory and practice to the whole canon of Conrad's works. Using a broadly structuralist approach, Dr Lothe analyses Conrad's sophisticated narrative method, focusing on his use of devices, functions, variations, and thematic effects or implications. More widely, he explores the relationship between Conrad's narrative method and the complex thematics engendered and shaped by this method. Discussing the notions of major post-structuralist critics such as Edward W. Said and J. Hillis Miller, he develops and applies a critical methodology which is flexible enough to respond to the varying interpretative problems presented by Conrad's fiction.

Narrative in Fiction and Film gives a clear presentation of key concepts of narrative theory such as author, narrator, and reader. The main focus of the book is on narrative fiction (short stories and novels), yet the film aspect is brought into each chapter. The first part of the book introduces the key concepts of narrative theory and the second part of the book illustrates and tests the theories by analysing five texts: the parable of the sower in St. Mark's Gospel, Franz Kafka's The Trial, James Joyce's The Dead, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and the film version of these texts.

Refreshing, inclusive approaches to the theory and practice of short fiction The Art of Brevity gathers fresh ideas about the theory and writing of short fiction from around the globe to produce an international, inclusive exploration of the steadily growing field of short story studies. While Anglo-American scholars have served as the primary developers of contemporary short story theory since the field's inception in the 1960s, this volume adds the contributions of scholars living in other parts of the world. Such Anglo-American pioneers as Mary Rohrberger, Charles E. May, Susan Lohafer, and John Gerlach join with short fiction scholars at universities in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Canada to build academic bridges and expand the field, geographically as well as conceptually. Contributors weave together themes of time, space, compression, mystery, reader response, and narrative closure. They discuss writers as varied as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Sarah Orne Jewett, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Mavis Gallant, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Robert Olen Butler. Among the less familiar topics they investigate are the Australian tall tale, the nineteenth-century queer story, and contemporary Danish "short shorts."