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Article: The ancien regime and fetishistic politics in The Nigger of the "Narcissus".
- Article from:
- Conradiana
- Article date:
- March 22, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 Texas Tech University Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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A great man works with the ideas of his age, and regenerates them. [...] But his own mind has its ordinary side, the regeneration of ideas is not complete, and the notions of the day not only limit the range of his achievement [...] but float about unassimilated within his living stream of thought. And thus he will seem to have preached the very superstitions which he combated.
--Bernard Bosanquet, qtd. as epigraph to Fleishman
As Avrom Fleishman realized, Bernard Bosanquet's statement applies well to Conrad's complex engagement with both his own background and the central concerns of his day. As Bosanquet points out, such complexity is often unfairly ...